Discovering and initializing a data volume at VM provision

A few posts back I wrote about using PowerShell to find the DVD drive that a particular installer was attached to and then running that command line installer.

To take that a bit further I have a VM that I am deploying, and that VM has an empty VHDX attached to it.

This VHDX is on the second IDE controller (it needs to be available early in the boot process of the OS).  When I provision this VM the first time, I want to find, online, initialize, and format that virtual disk.

$disk = Get-Disk | where {($_.BusType -eq "ATA") -and ($_.IsBoot -eq $false)}

(You could also find the disk if it was on the SCSI controller)

$disk = Get-Disk | where {$_.BusType -eq "SCSI"}

And now for mounting, and formatting the disk.

Set-Disk -InputObject $disk -IsOffline $false

Set-Disk -InputObject $disk -IsReadOnly $false

Initialize-Disk -InputObject $disk -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -WarningAction SilentlyContinue

$partition = New-Partition -InputObject $disk -UseMaximumSize –AssignDriveLetter

$partition | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel "Cache" -Force:$true -Confirm:$false

And now you simply continue along with your scripting.

The reason that I capture the new partition to $partition is that there are lots of useful stuff in there for configuring things moving on.  Little things like: $partition.DriveLetter are highly useful.