assigning drive letters during unattended install

[mas0212]

I'm doing an unattended install of WinXP. I'm trying to get the Program Files directory to install to D:\Program Files, and the Documents and Settings directory to install to E:\Profiles. I've made the correct settings in UNATTEND.TXT, so when I go through with the installation it does think that's where things should go, but it doesn't have the right drive letters at the beginning of the install process, so either files get put in the wrong places or don't get installed at all.

How can I assign drive letters to the right partitions before the setup program proceeds with the installation?

Thanks a lot.

[IcemanND]

Either repartition/reorganize your drives so they will automatically be lettered correctly, or run a diskpart script during t-39 to correctly letter the drives.

[mas0212]

OK, thanks. Both of those make sense, but I guess that's why I'm stuck. I don't know how Windows determines the drive letter for a partition, and I don't know where in the unattended configuration I should insert a diskpart script to get it to run at the right time, T-39 as you said.

I'd rather do it the diskpart way, if I can, so I have two questions about that. First, where should I insert the script in the configuration to get it to run at the right time? Is cmdlines.txt the right place? It seems like that would run too late, but I'm not sure.

Second, I don't understand how to tell diskpart which partition to change the letter of. I guess it will run after the partition and format step of the setup, so windows should already have assigned drive letters to the partitions I created, and I suppose I could do an install without diskpart and just see what drive letters get assigned, then use those in my diskpart script to reassign letters. Would that work?

Thanks a lot for your help.

[IcemanND]

How Windows assigns drive letters:

1. Assign the drive letter 'A' to the boot floppy, and 'B' to the secondary floppy.

2. Assign a drive letter, beginning with 'C' to the first active primary partition recognized upon the first physical hard disk.

3. Assign subsequent drive letters to the first primary partition upon each successive physical hard disk drive, if present within the system.

4. Assign subsequent drive letters to every recognized logical partition, beginning with the first hard drive and proceeding through successive physical hard disk drives, if present within the system.

5. Assign subsequent drive letters to any RAM Disk.

6. Assign subsequent drive letters to any additional floppy, CD/DVD drives.

T-39 - DetachedProgram - winnt.sif setting

[mas0212]

Thanks Iceman. That's great. Very helpful.

Last question: when my diskpart script runs, will Windows have already assigned drive letters according to the algorithm you outlined?

(If so, I will know which drives will have which letters so I can write my diskpart script accordingly.)

Thanks again.