Secondart Partition and Drive Letter Assignment

[Epitome]

Hi guys,

After developing my OSD process for my work and creating all my WIMs, the IT manager decided that it would be better for us to install the SCCM client and cache into a secondary partition in a hidden folder. Reason for this is we use DeepFreeze and the cache/config is getting wiped at thaw time and is causing problems with Windows Updates. I understand why, but it's creating quite a difficulty to implement. After a few hours of investigation I thought I had a solution. In the "Format and Partition Disk" step of the TS I have a 60GB Primary partition (SCCM Partition) created with no drive letter assigned, then the remaining disk space used for OSDisk. I did this because it was assigning C to the SCCM partition and wanted to install the OS to it. I thought if I used a diskpart command utilizing a txt file to assign M (the letter we settled on) to partition 1 of disk 0 (which is what diskpart told me it was) before the "Setup Windows and Configuration Manager" step, there would be an M drive for SCCM to install to, as per the installation properties I set, namely: smscachesize=40960 smscachedir="M:\SCCM\cache" ccminstalldir="M:\SCCM\client"

I am getting no failures in the TS, and in fact nothing in the log files shows any failure except the normal ones you'll see regularly. The diskpart step is completing properly according to the smsts.log file. However, for some reason once the system finishes imaging there is no M drive, SCCM isn't installed and as a result none of the UDI-chosen software is installed either. There is no CCM folder anywhere to be found. The partition is visible in Disk Management, but has no drive letter assigned and if I assign it M there is no data in it. I'm really surprised that the step to install the client finishes without error and clearly didn't work. Thing is, I can't get a log file after that point to check because, once again, the SCCM files are nowhere to be found. I know I could do this by completely redoing the WIM I based everything off of, but that would take several days of work, and I'm about to leave on vacation for a week. Below are screencaps of the steps in question and a copy of the simply diskpart.txt file I'm using. Help please!

diskpart.txt

[JEiben812]

Hoping you found an answer to this by now, but if not...

If you move your diskpart step to after "Setup Windows and Configuration Manager" (hence, after the first reboot) it should work.  The problem is that where you have that step, it is assigning the drive letter in WinPE before the Windows OS ever initializes.  Moving the step to after the first Windows OS boot will set the drive letter in the Windows OS and should persist.