Win PE & Physical Drive Enumeration
Hello.. I’ve been looking at an issue for the last couple of days that has me somewhat confused. I know there have been other posts regarding this but I’ve not yet seen a definitive reason behind it…unless I have missed it all togehter.. We have a small number of systems in the environment that have two physical drives for example a 75GB drive and a 300GB drive, meaning the preferred setup would be: Disk 0 (75GB) 200 MB: System reserved (bitlocker): Hidden Partition 50GB: OSDisk: C Partition 24GB: Data: D Partition Disk 1 (300GB) 300GB: Extra: E Partition Can someone please explain why in Win PE these disks randomly swap between Disk 0 and Disk 1?? I need to ensure that in a system refresh scenario these desktops only ever have W7 Enterprise installed to Disk 0 (in the example above) thus leaving Disk 1 alone. We are using the OSPart task sequence variable at the apply OS Phase so I am going to try to use the following script that I believe Niall had a hand in creating in order to target the current partition that has Windows installed: <job id="GetDriveletter"> <script language="VBScript" src="..\ZTIUtility.vbs"/> <script language="VBScript"> dim driveSearch Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set colDrives = objFSO.Drives For Each objDrive in colDrives driveSearch = objDrive.DriveLetter & ":\\Windows\\explorer.exe" strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colFiles = _ objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * From CIM_DataFile Where Name = '" & driveSearch & "'") If colFiles.Count < 1 Then Else oEnvironment.Item("OSPART") = objDrive.DriveLetter & ":" End If Next </script> </job> I would still very much appreciate any insight as to why the Disk numbers change at what seems to be random intervals….is it a hardware issue i.e. symptom of using SATA drives, or that OSD prefers the larger drive, or just a Win PE quirk... Thanks. Rich.
October 27th, 2011 10:55am

Most likely just a WinPE quirk / JohanRegards / Johan Arwidmark Twitter: @jarwidmark Blog: http://www.deploymentresearch.com FB: www.facebook.com/deploymentresearch
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
October 31st, 2011 8:25am

Yes, concur with Johan. As I know when load into WinPE, disks marked from disk0 to diskN in the order in which they are enumerated.Therefore, the disk-assignment numbers may change between startups. So I think Niall's script is the best solution. Take a reference of the following links, and they seem to explain the reason: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937251 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825668 Hope this will help. Thanks
November 3rd, 2011 5:26am

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics