I'm trying to do an exact clone of my laptop that's running Windows 8. There is an OEM partition that I can't assign a letter to. I'm using DISM, which uses the drive letters to know what to capture.

I was wondering if there was a way to assign a letter to the OEM partition. I've looked at diskpart and assign letter does not work for OEM partitions. I was wondering if there was a work around.

Also I looked into partitions and volumes and it was a bit confusing, how are they correlated? Are volumes subsets of partitions?

Hi,

I would like to verify if there is any description on the OEM partition. Here is a similar post for your reference.

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/t/19361979.aspx

Regarding the Volumes and Partition question, please refer to this article.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd163559.aspx

Its possible that partition is the recovery partition. Usually that partition is locked so that you can't make changes to it from Windows.

The OEM partition is typically a special recovery partition that is not meant to be browsed.  Assigning a drive letter would gain you nothing.

Using DISM, the OEM partition should not be an issue as it seems you are using Windows 8/8.1 at your job.  The OEM partition is primarily for home-based, end users; not for corporate entities.

As a matter of fact, you can safely delete the OEM partition--when doing a clean install--with no ill effect.