Automating installation rename optical and SSD/HDD during post install

Does anyone know of a way to rename drives in a system via powershell, registry or commands (eg DISM, WMIC, etc).. NOTE: Powershell's get-disk does not appear to detect optical drives.

I have 10 PCs. They have a varying number of drives. All have at least one optical, all have at least one SSD and HDD. The SSD always has two partitions at least; 96GB for Windows and whatever is left over for a second or possibly a third partition.

Each PC connects to a server and maps drive letters M: - Y:

I have standardized letters for all PCs based on usage.

D:\ is always for games
E:\ Is always for downloads
F:\ is for media/content creation/editing and related tasks
G:\ is used for general data
H:\ is used for programming, scripting, web design and related tasks (If present)

I want optical drives to always be A: and B: Windows always starts at D: during install, which varies from PC to PC (It never seems to see the drives in the same order during install, even if I always put SSD on SATA port 0, optical on Port(s) 2 (and 3), and HDDs or other SSDs on the next few ports.

I can't use diskpart - This is for use in setupcomplete or autounattend.xml.

Now that I think about, I vaguely recall reading something about this a few years back... To figure out which drive should have which drive letter we'd need other specifics, such as disk type (SSD, HDD), and size.

Anyone think this is doable?

thanks

<sigh> Perhaps I over did it with the amount of detail.

I'm not writing applications for the wild. The drive letters I assign to shares on my server or what I call my local drives is not a matter of software development standards.

I'm automating the installation of Windows on PCs in my home environment.

I'm not referring to the recovery or system partitions that do not get assigned drive letters, nor am I wanting to change the C: drive.

I know how to change drive letters with interactive tools like computer management and diskpart.

Let start again. Forget everything I said in the OP.

The question is;

How do I change or reassign a drive letter from a command line or using powershell, regardless of drive type?

Thank you.

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Berton said:

traditionally drives A: and B: have been reserved in the BIOS for floppy drives. Depending upon the motherboard there may even be a socket for the ribbon connector between the board and a drive.

Floppy drives? yeah, 20 years ago. Ribbon? Do you mean IDE cable? Or are you thinking laptops?

I've been using A: and B: for Optical drives for almost 2 decades. Have to! I keep running out of drive letters. And I've never had a conflict with any application, OS (since Windows 2000), or BIOS. There are certainly no "hard" restrictions preventing the use of A: and B:

Yes, I looked at Macrium, In fact it's one of the programs that is installed by my script.

10 PCs. The script "knows" about the various requirements of each PC (what programs, drivers, drives etc). But this is the deployment process for a new version of Windows so there are no images existing that I can use Macrium to restore. Of course, once the process is complete, Macrium creates an image which I can then use should I need to recover a PC to a "pristine" state.

I typically do a once a year refresh (unless issues demand additional installations). Usually the YY09 Windows version I do over Christmas after spending months testing it. The Windows image is customized using MSMG Toolkit, then a USB drive is created with all the various motherboard and other drivers, applications and scripts.

Thanks for the link. I'd previously read a lot of the MS docs on this subject, but alas the one thing I can't find the answer to is the changing of drive letters from a command line.

Compumind said:

Please explain, if different from the above.

I'm getting dizzy.

I didn't ask the question here without having gone looking for the answer myself. I've spent a lot of time developing my script. That would have been near impossible without the Microsoft docs, and help from users at MDL, Bleeping Computer and so on. But the one question I can't find an answer to is "How to change/reassign a drive letter from the command line".

I started the script when 1703 came out. The link that you provided is a place I spent a lot of time, as well as privacy and security settings sites (including Microsoft's), group policy settings and a number of websites dealing with security, hardening Windows and powershell, DISM and WMIC references.

Though all of those travels I cannot find the answer to that one question.

Does that make things crystal clear now?