Having your content on a different partition than your Operating System is a good security practice. In previous IIS versions is was possible to do this during setup time in an unattend file. Due to changes in Vista and Windows Server 2008 setup it became impossible to do that however. After setup the IIS7 INETPUB directory will be on the same partition as Windows. Moving the INETPUB directory to a different drive has to be done after setup completes. Here is a table of configuration entries that use the INETPUB directory on a default install.

Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 introduces a new XML-based configuration system for storing your IIS settings that replaces the metabase that was used in IIS 6.0 and earlier. This new configuration system was introduced with ASP.NET and is based on a hierarchical system of management system that uses *.config files.

Web Deploy (Web Deployment Tool) simplifies the migration, management and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications and Web sites. Administrators can use command-line scripting with Web Deploy to synchronize IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0 servers or to migrate an IIS 6.0 server to IIS 7.0. Web Deploy Tool also enables administrators and delegated users to use IIS Manager to deploy ASP.NET and PHP applications to an IIS 7.0 server.