10 Nov 2016 • on

windows automated volume format

On linux there are two common ways to format a secondary volume

ssh and then run fdisk
cloud init

So how do you do this on windows in an automated way?

AWS recommends using plain old RDP and clicking through Disk Management or using their EC2Configuration Service
Azure recommends RDP, the azure-cli or plain old powershell. OpenStack recommends CloudBase init

CloudBase Init

CloudBase init is the windows version of cloud init from the fine folks at cloudbase solutions.

Nutanix

Unfortunately nutanix doesn’t have a metadata service yet, so cloudbase init wont work on windows machines.

The following powershell will find all raw volumes, and format them as GPT with the name ‘datadisk’

Deploying

To actually deploy this script, you will need to Invoke-Command or embed it in your configuration management tool (Ansible,Chef,Puppet,Salt)

Here is an example for Chef

powershell_script 'Format Volumes' do
  guard_interpreter :powershell_script
  code <<-EOH
  Write-Host "Initializing and formatting raw disks"

  $disks = Get-Disk | where partitionstyle -eq 'raw'

  ## start at F: because D: is reserved in Azure and sometimes E: shows up as a CD drive in Azure
  $letters = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList
  $letters.AddRange( ('F','G','H','I','J','K','L','M','N','O','P','Q','R','S','T','U','V','W','X','Y','Z') )

  Function AvailableVolumes() {
      $currentDrives = get-volume
      ForEach ($v in $currentDrives) {
          if ($letters -contains $v.DriveLetter.ToString()) {
              Write-Host "Drive letter $($v.DriveLetter) is taken, moving to next letter"
              $letters.Remove($v.DriveLetter.ToString())
          }
      }
  }

  ForEach ($d in $disks) {
      AvailableVolumes
      $driveLetter = $letters[0]
      Write-Host "Creating volume $($driveLetter)"
      $d | Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT -PassThru | New-Partition -DriveLetter $driveLetter  -UseMaximumSize
      # Prevent error ' Cannot perform the requested operation while the drive is read only'
      Start-Sleep 1
      Format-Volume  -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel "datadisk" -DriveLetter $driveLetter -Confirm:$false
  }
  EOH
  only_if "[bool]$(get-disk | where partitionstyle -eq 'raw')"
end