deployment to flash

I have systems that I boot either via RBS or their own flash. Note that on
my target flash has the appearance of a hard drive (it is not on a USB bus).
Obviously upgrading an RBS image is simple involving replacement of the SDI
on the boot server. I want to implement the following for replacing the
entire flash load on many machines:
1. Boot an RBS/SDI image.
2. This system will see the flash as the D: drive.
3. Overwrite files on D: via code in the SDI system that gets files from a
server and writes them to D:
This is also relatively simple although not yet implemented. There is a
hard part. When I get target boards pre-loaded with an industrial flash
device, the devices are completely "erased" in the sense that all bits are
zero. I would like to partition/format such a new device as step 1.5 above.
I can do so in XP Desktop using the Computer Management/Disk Management GUI
but my XPe system is small and Command Shell based. Since MS claims that
DiskPart is a superset of the CM/DM, I should be able to perform the
operations programmatically in XPe by invoking a scripted DiskPart session
but I cannot find commands in the "superset" that does what the "subset"
accomplishes. My question is whether there is a way to accomplish my task
by using API functions in Windows or via DiskPart commands that I have not
found.

HM