Diskpart while remote booted?

[Heidi Linda]

I've been asked to implement something which I thought sounded fairly
simple - we don't want to remove the hard drives from our boxes in order to
install the OS, so the plan was to remote boot the units to a minimal image
(thanks Brad for pointing out my idiocy on that part) and from there to use
Diskpart to clean and partition the drive and assign it a drive letter.
However, whenever I try to do this, if I am starting from a blank disk, I
get to the point of assigning a drive letter and then get the message
"Diskpart cannot reassign the drive letter on a system, boot or pagefile
volume" and if I am not starting with a blank disk, I cannot clean the
drive, getting the message "The selected disk is neccessary to the operation
of your computer, and may not be cleaned."
Is there a way around this?

 

[KM]

Heidi,

Have you tried cleaning up [HKLM\System\MountedDevices] key just before you capture the image into SDI file?

Also, keep in mind that C: drive letter is hardcoded in RAMDisk driver so you cannot use it.

 

[Heidi Linda]

No I hadn't tried that, and I wasn't trying to use c:

Heidi,

Have you tried cleaning up [HKLM\System\MountedDevices] key just before

you capture the image into SDI file?

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Heidi,

There are few types of problems here involved that we solved in this NG before:
First if you see HDD volume letters in install (remote booted XPe) then you don't need to reassign them, you can deploy XPe on let
us say E: and when you boot from HDD this will actually be C:.

As you know volume letter are assigned separately for each XPe OS in their registry either you can do that from TD or just let
PnP/FBA do it during the install phase.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/community/community/tips/xp/rtpartin/default.aspx

Regarding the inability to reassign volume letters this problem you should look in following threads.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group...c.windowsxp.embedded&q=SystemPartition&qt_g=1

Solution was among other things related to deleting registry entry SystemPartition.


Regards,
Slobodan

No I hadn't tried that, and I wasn't trying to use c:

Heidi,

Have you tried cleaning up [HKLM\System\MountedDevices] key just before

you capture the image into SDI file?

Also, keep in mind that C: drive letter is hardcoded in RAMDisk driver so you cannot use it.