Hi all,

I don't think this is posted in the rights forum section since SCCM does this automatically, but I guess you guys would know all the answers..

SCCM installs the disk lay-out automatically in the task sequence.

I was just browsing technet and saw that you could also add this in the unattend file (using SIM) and use diskpart to partition your disk. I have the following questions:

At the diskpart link, I can see that "drive letters" are used for the Windows RE Tools/Recovery Image/ESP partitions.

• Why are they used when they shouldn't be assigned a letter and won't be assigned a letter in diskmgmt?
• Drive Letters aren't used in SIM.. Why is this?
  
• Can a random letter be chosen or do I need to take the place in the alphabet into account so the partitions are placed in the correct order?
  
• Why is the "Windows" partition assigned letter "W" and not letter "C"?
  On this link, I can see the following statement: In this example, the Windows partition is assigned the letter "W" to avoid drive-letter conflicts. After the computer reboots, the primary hard drive is automatically reassigned to the letter "C".
• If you're not using SCCM (Dell KACE for instance) is it better to partition the disk first using diskparts commands or just use SIM to create the correct partitions in the answer file? What's the best practise?
  

Thanks in advance!

Regards,

Sven

I never saw WSIM used to do partitioning jobs together with ConfMgr OSD. Cant figure out any reason to do so. I think you might think about this too complicated. This is already something which is being taking care of. Just remember one thing - when creating Build & Capture image, always use single+simple partitioning.

This will probably not give your any answer to your question, but thought could be worth of posting :)

Hi,

Based on my experience, no matter how you assign the letters in PE environment, the full OS  will reallocate drive letters when startup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_of_assignme

Hi Yannara,

Thanks for the reply. It's indeed something which is done automatically with SCCM, but wanted to get some additional information about partitioning.. Also, I'm currently creating a Task Sequence for Dell KACE where this is not done automatically..

For the B&C, I though it was the best way to go, so glad it's confirmed :) Thx!!

Okay, thx for the information. But why it's then needed to assign drive letters in WinPE, when they get switched in the full OS?

On the technet link, I saw that it's import to have the correct order in the partitions. I guess the order is based on the order in the diskpart command and not on the drive letter assignment?