Assigning a letter to a disk without any notification

[lailaa19]

Hello pbatard, I'm working on a software to create virtual disks, i have been able to apply the windows image on the disk and customize everything using its volume guid, the final step is assign a letter, however, whenever a letter is assigned it shows a shell notification, i'm trying to find a way to avoid this, i mean, a "silently" way to assign the disk a letter.

While searching around i found this part of the code, but i didnt understand what DefineDosDeviceA really does, and if it could help on this case.

// bcdboot doesn't like it if you forget the starting ''

rufus/src/drive.c

Line 2174 in 1e2f1c1

if (!DefineDosDeviceA(DDD_RAW_TARGET_PATH | DDD_NO_BROADCAST_SYSTEM, mounted_drive, &volume_name[14])) {

Also, in relation to bcdboot I have tried multiple ways to get it to work with a unc path like:

1. bcdboot G:\ /s Volume{d2a1742f-a81e-4740-ba78-c0ff34898478}
2. bcdboot \PhysicalDrive3\Windows /s Volume{d2a1742f-a81e-4740-ba78-c0ff34898478}
3. bcdboot \\?\Volume{ec668c78-a652-4056-862e-6e1a29dafe27}\  /s Volume{d2a1742f-a81e-4740-ba78-c0ff34898478}
4. bcdboot Volume{ec668c78-a652-4056-862e-6e1a29dafe27}  /s Volume{d2a1742f-a81e-4740-ba78-c0ff34898478}

Where d2a1742f... is the system partition and ec668... the Windows folder gpt partition.
Only 1. works all other attempts fail with:

Failure when attempting to copy boot files.

I posted a detailed question with all my attempts on the microsoft Q&A forum, I wonder if you could take a look at it, also, if possible, this related question.

[pbatard]

I'm not sure I completely understand what your issue is, but I think it is tied with autorun, and you therefore might have to perform the same dance Rufus performs, which is to use Local Group Policies to temporarily disable autorun (look up NoDriveTypeAutorun) per https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/blob/master/src/rufus.c#L3676-L3678, so that Windows won't pop up a dialog when it sees a new drive has been created.

But apart from that, sorry, I just don't really have the scope to look into your specific problem. Good luck with your software project though.