At work, I sometimes have the need to create usable operating system partitions quickly on 20 or so hard drives, and it gets absolutely boring deleting existing partitions in Windows Disk Management, creating new partitions, and formatting each one. So I came up with this script that does it all for me.
It's basically a Perl script, but relies heavily on existing Windows features: diskpart - a disk management utility that comes with Windows XP/2003, and Windows Scripting Host - the default scripting engine that handles the VBScript I use. WSH uses OLE and the WMI framework. This is not the best implementation of the idea, but it absolutely works, so I don't care.
===
This script will attempt to determine what the system disk is and exclude it from all operations. Then it deletes all partitions on other hard drives, creates a 4GB partition, and formats it with the NTFS file system. It runs in under a minute, obviously depending on how many drives you have. I tested it with 23 (the most you can assign drive letters to in Windows). It doesn't work well on Windows 2000 because (1) it doesn't come standard with diskpart.exe, and (2) the WSH on it is ancient. On Windows 2000, it fails to format the partitions created.
Needless to say, don't be dumb and run it on a system with useful partitions. I don't give any warnings - I assume that in running the script, you really want to get rid of all partitions/volumes on your system except the system partition.
This script can be adapted many ways: split the main features into own module-friendly scripts or subroutines, or a mechanism to specify varying partition sizes and file systems, and whether to quick format or do a full format. You can even adapt it to operate on a remote machine (do you see how?).
===
Download the create-partitions-win.pl script.
