Hey everyone, I have a problem with SCCM 2007 in the task sequencer for os deployment in the "Partition Disk 0 - Phase". Is it possible to assign the first hard disk a fix letter after partitioning it? Now the SCCM 2007 assigns the next available drive letter to the first partition e.g. e:, but its not very nice to have the system drive located at e:. So what can I do to assign a fix drive letter? Thanks in advance for your help. Regards, Jan

Hi Jan, Unfortunately, we do not expose a mechanism to assign a drive letter to the partition in WinPE. This is because the letter the drive gets in WinPE does not have an impact on what the actual drive letter will be in the new operating system. When the machine boots the OS will re-enumerate the drives and assign a new letter to the system drive typically C: (e.g. even though the drive is appearing as E: in WinPE the system drive should be C: once the machine reboots). So, the built-in disk partition action just assigns the next available drive letter. If you would like to access this drive in later actions you can configure the disk partition action to set a variable with the drive letter (Advanced Options section of the Partition Properties page).

Just to add to what Brett said... If you apply an operating system image to the partition, OSD will preserve the drive letter in the image when you boot into the full OS. For example, if the image you're applying was captured from volume D: on the reference machine, then after you apply the image the OS volume letter will be D:, regardless of what drive letter the volume has in WinPE.For more information, see: http://blogs.technet.com/inside_osd/archive/2007/08/08/why-does-vista-end-up-on-the-d-drive.aspx

Hey Brett, this sounds good, but the OS doesnt re-enumerate the drives here in this environment. Do I have to set up anything for that? What about the script-sources from SCCM 2007? Why are they only advertised as exe-files? In BDD 2007 they are all vbs or cmd-scripts. That was very comfortablefor making some minor/major changes in the scripts! Regards, Jan

Who said you cant advertise a script? I run use this everyday. The RunCommandLineAction just does a CreateProcess() and can run anything that windows has in its assoc table (vb, js, bat, cmd, exe, ...) Software Dist has the same functionality. One thing to note is simple commands like 'echo' are not "real commands" but actually part of cmd. As such you have to call them as "cmd /c echo hi there"; You might have a similar situation where at some points in the task sequence you need to do "cscript myFile.vbs"

The OS does re-enumerate the drives -- that's what Windows always does, and ConfigMgr doesn't have any control over that. But evidently you aren't getting the drive letters you expect. Can you be more specific about what drive letters you are getting vs. what you expect? And what is your disk layout from a hard drive and partition standpoint? Also, where did you get the image you are deploying? Did you take it directly off the Vista media, or did you capture it yourself from a reference computer? As for your second question, the built-in actions in the ConfigMgr 2007 task sequencer are implemented as .exe files rather than scripts because they are delivered to every client computer as part of the ConfigMgr client. You don't want the end user potentially modifying these on his own computer. And the .exe files make use of C/C++ style APIs that are internal to the ConfigMgr client. So in general, the built-in actions should be treated as black boxes that are not modifiable. And even the interfaces to the .exe files is not documented. The .exe files should not be used standalone or in other environments. We've tried to make available through the SDK any functionality you might need to customize the ConfigMgr product. Admittedly, this is different from the BDD approach, but BDD doesn't try to maintain an ongoing system management presence on the target computer.

Hey Michael, I added a reboot after partitioning the disk and now the OS is deployed on drive C. Thats what I wanted. ;-) It would be helpful to have an diskpart - rescan in the partitioning-script, so that a reboot isnt necessary. Okay I understand why the scripts are only offered as exe-files. So my approach now is to modify some BDD-scripts and integrate them into the SCCM. Thank you very much for your time and efforts! Regards, Jan

I still don't understand what's going on. The reboot should not be necessary in the normal OS deployment scenario. Even if the OS image is applied to what WinPE thinks is the E: drive or whatever, when the new OS boots up for the first time, the OS will come out as C:

Now in the deployment it works fine, in the process it shows the e:, but in vista it appears as c:. Thats very nice, thank you!

The Format and Partition Disk action does do a rescan. However, I don't think diskpart rescan does what you think it does. It doesn't re-enumerate drives and assign new letters to them. From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415: Use the rescan command to rescan all I/O buses and cause any new disks that have been added to the computer to be discovered. We do a rescan to ensure that newly partitioned disks will be visible to other applications after the Format and Partition Disk action completes.

Hi! I have a problem with SCCM 2007 When the deploy the OS. As a result, the workstation system drive is D: Can not be specifically what / where you need to change, that system drive would be C:? cenubit