Deployment Solution

Hello,

I've seen that many people prefer Altiris utility "firm.exe" to copy files (drivers etc.) to imaged harddisk. Why so many are using firm.exe and not eg. xcopy for example?

I'm using WinPE 2.1 as automation and deploying WinXP images with Ghost, using Distribute Disk Image task.

Hallo Weedee

As far as i know, there aren't any obvious reason for this.
You only use firm to copy the drivers, not doing driver injection, you can chose to use xcopy if you prefer this.

The reason i think people in here are telling other people to use firm instead of xcopy is you can use the "prod:drivers" which then will get your drivers down to your "production" partition, meaning we don't need to know which partition is the production C:\ or D:\. - i don't know whether this is correct, but it's an assumption.

Kind Regards
Morten Leth

Hmm...in our environment not a single PC has Windows installed on different partition than C. Any idea how firm.exe decides which partition is "production" partition?

The benefit is that your automation environment may assign drive letters differently than your production environment.  Windows may be on drive C:\ when you're logged in to Windows, but depending on automation, it could be C:\ or D:\ or even something else.  By using prod: in FIRM.

I'm not sure how it makes the determination of a prod: partition.

I haven't used FIRM since switching our environment to Windows 7. For some reason FIRM Prod thinks that our "System Reserved" volume is the production volume, and the drivers get copied to a location that is not available during Sysprep/OOBE. I have no idea how it decides what is production or not, but it does appear to be a bit of a fail with out W7 images. Xcopy is the answer, and we need to specify "D:" as the target location.

To be honest, I now run a batch script that checks all drive letters for a "%:\BootMGR" and sets that as "%___Drive_SR%" and then again for "%:\Windows\System32\explorer.exe" and sets that to "%___Drive_OS%". I then use these values to set the BCD and perform any required file copy operations etc. Works a treat. I like having more control than less - as is the case with Firm and the fact that nobody seems to know how exactly it works. 

I' ve never been convinced of the logic that firm uses for the production partition. I suspected at one point that it was using the first partition which was *not* an automation partition. It can certainly in my experience make mistakes.

I think the reason for having the firm command available is to have a cross-platform program for copying files across varying filesystem types with the same syntax. For example, it's going to be tricky copying files from DOS automation to an NTFS partition. Firm makes this a doddle.

But if you are a WinPE automation man, then of course XCopy is just as good.

Hi Weedee -have the above posts answered your query?