If anyone could help here ...

I boot PE on a CD and run a DISKPART script to configure C: D: and E:

Format C: D: and E: ... label them C_DRIVE, D_DRIVE, E_DRIVE

I can go into Diskpart and verify this is the configuration, all drive letters assigned to partitions correctly.

copy my answer file to the root of the newly created and formatted C: drive

I then run WINNT32.EXE and supply a custom UNATTEND.TXT


When Windows setup completes, I go into disk manager and see this:
Click to view attachment

It shows the D_DRIVE volume as drive E: and the E_DRIVE volume as drive D: !!!

Has anyone encountered this ?? more importantly is there a fix/solution ??

when you partition the disks Windows assigns the drive letters by the type of partition. Since you setup the drive letters in PE they are not store in XP so they are reassigned. You can either reassign them suring the install or create your partitions differently.

Windows assigns drive letters in order to primary partitions first, the returns to the first disk and assigns to extended partitions.

If you create all of your partitions as primary partitions your porblem should be solved, or create the partition on the second drive as an extended partition instead of a primary partition.

Thanks,

I did find an article that the drive letter assignments were lost during that reboot ...

I do create them all as primary ... I'lll try creating the E: as an extended and see what result that brings.

How is this accomplished?

I am researching this now ... just to figure out how.

You can use diskpart to reassign driver letters. depending upon when you start writing things to those drives you ccan do it during any of the ponts during an install where you can run your own installers and scripts.

The settings created by diskpart and the windisk.exe both reside in the system registry. Different installations of windows can maintain different drive letters. More over, if you add extra partitions to disk 1, and install a new Windows on that disk, the drives are different again.

Each copy of windows essentially sees the drives as they appeared the first time, and remembers this order. You can use diskpart and windisk to change these to something else, but that is only for that version of windows.

Even having something like a thumb-drive in the usb can affect the drive-letter windows is installed on, if the OS goes onto an extended partition.