Hi Everyone I am in the process of building a Windows 2008 Enterprise SP2 VM within ESXi and I am having an issue with the partition that will be used for bitlocker encryption changing from S: drive to D: drive upon completion of the server 2008 build. I have created the VM, boot off a 2008 ISO. Choose repair option, choose command prompt. Setup the 2 partitions using diskpart, setting a 1.5GB S drive and a 25GB C drive. The S drive is made active. When i list the volumes it shows as S: drive and C: drive. Format both drives, then continue with the 2008 normal installation. Once the installation has finished and I logon and check disk management, I now have a 1.5GB D drive partition instead of S: drive. I do not know why the drive letter changes. Tried changing within disk management and using diskpart but because it is an boot partition I cannot change the drive letter. I have built the server twice now but the same problem occurs. Does anyone have any ideas why the drive letter changes during the windows 2008 install? And can this be fixed? I would like my secondary data drive on the server to be named D: drive, not thebit lockerpartition. I have done an install, then used the bitlocker drive preparation tool which successfully creates an S drive partition however it creates the partition at the end of the disk so if I want to increase the size of the C drive partition, this causes problems. Any advice appreciated. Cheers Colin

Hi Colin, In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, system would create a System Reserved partition for Bitlocker whose attribute NODEFAULTDRIVELETTER was set. You don’t need create partition manually for it. For Windows Server 2008/Vista, please set NODEFAULTDRIVELETTER for your Drive S: and test. For your reference: DiskPart Command-Line Options http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465(WS.10).aspx Thanks. This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hi Mervyn I followed your instructions and they worked very well. Many thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Really appreciated. Cheers Colin