Windows 11 24h2 Unattend Installation Problems

Hi,

I work for a company that provides automated OS installations (Windows and Linux) for it's users/customers.

I am having problems to install Win11 24h2 with an unattended installation. After the WinPE part/setup.exe the machine doesn't start and just cycles in the loading icon of the first reboot and does nothing.

The same unattend.xml works fine on Win11 23h2.

The installation procedure: The machine first boots into a linux image, prepartitions the drive, copies files onto the disk (WinPE), patches the unattend.xml and then reboots into the WinPE.

I discovered it must have to do something with the

Code:

<ModifyPartitions>

section in my unattend.xml. When I just comment it out or remove it, the installation runs fine. But this isn't a solution as this works good on a single disk and system but will most likely fail on a multidisk system.

This is what the section looks like

Code:

                    <ModifyPartitions>
                         <ModifyPartition wcm:action="add">            
                             <Format>NTFS</Format>            
                             <Label>WINDOWS</Label>            
                             <Letter>C</Letter>            
                             <Order>1</Order>            
                             <PartitionID>3</PartitionID>    
                         </ModifyPartition>        
                         <ModifyPartition wcm:action="add">                       
                             <Label>WINPE</Label>
                             <Letter>X</Letter>
                             <Order>2</Order> 
                             <PartitionID>4</PartitionID>
                         </ModifyPartition>
                     </ModifyPartitions>

As we already have a proper partitioning done in the linux bootimage the unattend.xml doesn't need a CreatePartition section.

Within the OOBE we run scripts located on the WinPE partition.

Any suggestion what might cause the issue with 24h2? This works fine on Windows 10 and previous Windows 11 versions

Regards

raddirad

Hi I digged a bit deeper and found out the following section causes the issue

Code:

<ModifyPartition wcm:action="add">                      
<Label>WINPE</Label>
<Letter>X</Letter>
<Order>2</Order>
<PartitionID>4</PartitionID>
</ModifyPartition>

When I don't include it, the installation works fine. The partition labeled WINPE is then mounted as the next drive: D. This most probably will change if I include more partitions in the installation. However I need to have the WINPE partition on a specified drive as an OOBE script accesses it to execute a script.

Anny suggestion what might be broken in this section?

So my issue is resolved.

It seems that a partition cannot have the same drive letter as the WinPE ramdisk, as it was in my case. Strangely this only appeared with 24h2, before it worked perfectly fine with older versions of Windows.
Setting the letter to anything other than "X" solved the issue.