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  • 1.  Deploy Toolkit and USB drives

    Posted Jun 03, 2008 04:45 PM
    We have been using DeployCenter and the Deploy Toolkit for a number of years (prior to the Symantec aquisition) with great success.  We use the PQIDeploy to restore a master image and then PQA to inject drivers etc.
     
    We use WinPe as the boot environment and run this either from CD or a USB drive.  Recently we have seen an issue where the Deploy Toolkit tools detect the USB drive running WinPE as disk 1.  The fixed primary hard drive is disk 2.  We can see this by using PQQuery32 to query the disks.  Microsoft DiskPart however only lists one disk, the fixed hard drive.
     
    We have only seen the issue on a small number of devices (Dell XPS M1330, Lenovo T61) whereas other similar devices (eg. Lenovo X61) seem to work fine with the fixed hard disk detected as Disk 1 and USB disk 2.  One thought I had is whether it could be related to the size of the hard disk as both devices with the issue have large 100gb drives.
     
    Has anyone else seen this issue when booting WinPE from a USB drive?  Could it be a bug in the Deploy Toolkit tools?
     
    Thanks.
     
    Mark.
     


  • 2.  RE: Deploy Toolkit and USB drives

    Posted Jun 22, 2008 09:55 PM
    What version of Deploy toolkit are you using? Run one of the tools with the /ver switch to find out.
    What version of winPE are you using? Prior to WinPE 2.0 diskpart would not show removable devices in the disk listing, instead you would only see them using the 'list volumes' command. Different bios's behave differently with regards to USB handling, check any USB specific setting in the bios to see if changing anything there gives any results. Some machine bios's will start disk ordering from the usb while others will not. Even with winPE 2.0 I have machines which have the internal hdd's switched in order between booting to windows and winpe so you can not rely only on hdd ordering for automation in winpe. As long as DCL tools reports a drive you should be able to acess it with any DCL tool using the drive number reported. 


    Message Edited by Morgan Mackeson-Ellis on 06-22-2008 07:56 PM