Greetings! Hopefully this hasn't been asked to death elsewhere... I've tried to find some answers for this but have been unsuccessful so far. I've created an unattended answer file for Windows Deployment Services to login to the server, select the image, partition the drive, and start deployment all automatically.
If you do this manually, the deployment wizard will remind you that it has to create a 100mb system partition for Windows 7. After installation, the partition has no drive letter and is therefore effectively hidden from most end-users.
Unfortunately, when doing this automatically, everything I've tried in the answer file always seems to yield the same result: the system partition is visible to the end user and has been assigned a drive letter. The solution so far has been to go to each computer, remove it's drive letter, and then reassign the drive letter to the DVD drive, which is where it was intended to go.
Here is my current way I'm doing it:
<DiskConfiguration><WillShowUI>OnError</WillShowUI><Disk><DiskID>0</DiskID><WillWipeDisk>true</WillWipeDisk><CreatePartitions><CreatePartition><Type>Primary</Type><Order>1</Order><Size>100</Size></CreatePartition><CreatePartition><Type>Primary</Type><Order>2</Order><Extend>true</Extend></CreatePartition></CreatePartitions><ModifyPartitions><ModifyPartition><Format>NTFS</Format><PartitionID>2</PartitionID><Order>1</Order><Label>Windows</Label><Letter>C</Letter><Active>true</Active></ModifyPartition></ModifyPartitions></Disk></DiskConfiguration>
This creates the system partition but leaves it as "Raw" (which it seems like I've read it's supposed to be Raw but then I've also seen people show it as being NTFS...). When the system boots up, this will likely show up as the D drive and give a warning/error
when the user clicks on it because it isn't formatted.
So I guess I have two questions:
1) Is the System partition supposed to be Raw, NTFS, or FAT32?
2) Is there any way to set up the System partition when using an answer file so that the system understands what it is and doesn't give it a drive letter?
Thanks!
