PE drive letter

[Guest]

I have built a XP SP2 PE cd. When I boot off this cd, PE runs from the X:
drive (e.g....X:\system32\) I have other scripts, that I can not change, that
need to use the X: drive. How do I change the drive letter PE boots up on??

Thank you

 

[WM]

You cannot modify it.

In previous WinPE incarnations, the drive letter was unpredictable, but
would generally be the highest drive letter after all hard disk partitions
had been enumerated. WinPE from RIS always used X: previously.

With Windows XP SP2, and all versions of WinPE forward, WinPE will always
have the drive letter X:, regardless of partitions on the system, and
regardless of how it was booted. Note that since any letters you assign
during WinPE don't stick into any other Windows install, this is generally
of little consequence, other than providing a predictable drive letter in
WinPE - handy if you're doing scripting.

Hope that helps.

 

[Guest]

Yes...That does help. But not the answer I was hoping for. :-(

In my case, the best solution would be not to use PE from XP SP2. Just use a
previous version. Reason why is...that there are scripts that map drives as
the X: drive. These scripts were written by others and I can not change them.

The answer I was hoping for was..."You can change the drive letter in PE XP
SP2, but it is very tricky."
I am willing to try some complex process to make this change. I was hoping I
could build a special registry hive or boot file that could change this drive
letter to something else.

Thank you for your reply and info. Pass on more if you have any.

 

[WM]

Don't know what else to add - though I can tell you this change is the way
it will be from this version of WinPE forward - and the assignment happens
within Windows code - it isn't settable via a registry key - so you may
really want to see if you can get the scripts changed. Let me know if you
have any other PE questions and I'll try to help. Note that the changes in
XPSP2 usually make it a worthwhile shift - the Windows Firewall, which will
prevent vulnerabilities like last year's RPC issue from infecting PE while
running, and the ability to use WMI to query hardware information during
install... Those aren't in/can't be added to earlier versions of WinPE.

HTH