Make your old Win7 or Win8.x based WinPEs capables to access a multipartitioned USB stick, SD or MicroSD installing diskmod filter driver on the WinPEs.
When using a fixed type device or a USB HDD/SSD you do not have problems to read/write on all partitions from any WinPE, but if using a Win7 or Win8.x based WinPE, you only have access to firts partition of a multipartitioned USB stick, SD or MicroSD. Only A WinPE based on a Win10 v1703 or newer, is capable to access all partitions on this devices.
We have 5 PCs at home with a mix of Win7, and Win8 and Win8.1 (with Classic Shell), some of them (if capable) also have Win10 in dual boot (installed during the free offert, to get the ID), but nobody here likes Win10 and they continuous and problematic updates and Telemetry. As our lan is WiFi, I selected metered connection to stop the insidious updates, but finaly we all stop using 10.
So we are planning to keep using the old OS versions and old equipment as long as possible. And when not possible anymore maybe use Linux Mint, I have been testing it in triple boot and it looks fine for general pourpose. But keep 7 in dual boot for some games and programs that do not run on Linux.
I'm using now some multipartitioned fast MicroSD(s) + a USB 3.0 adapter but I also have several old WinPEs made some time ago from 7, 8 and 8.1 x64 and x86, that have been very usefull during many years, and I want to keep, and have them ready for use, just in case.
Install diskmod from karyonix on the running OS is very easy, but it is not the same thing on a WinPE.
Tried to install diskmod from karyonix mounting the boot.wim with Dism and install it as any other driver, but this don't work.
After running some experiments, I found the right way to install it on a PE:
Get diskmod from karyonix on his old post: http://reboot.pro/to...isk/?hl=diskmod
or from this optional link on downloads >>> tools section: http://reboot.pro/fi...le/617-diskmod/
Extract the boot.wim from the ISO (located into the folder sources), you can use 7-zip for this, and mount it with Dism or DismMountService from Retokener (in case the WIM file has two indexes select index 2), better option as you can handle all versions from same tool with the appropiated version of Dism (10.0.17763.1, info for download on the program) without having to download the full pakage.
Dism Mount Service download: http://reboot.pro/fi...-mount-service/
If your PE is x86 copy diskmod.sys to Windows\System32\drivers folder. DO NOT dismount it yet.
If your PE is x64 copy to another folder/location diskmo64.sys and rename it to diskmod.sys and then copy the renamed file to Windows\System32\drivers folder, DO NOT dismount it yet.
Mount the respective registry Hive with regedit,exe or use offlinereg from erwan.l (my prefered option) to inject the two attached registry files, do it one by one, if not, even if it is reported as correctly installed, it do not work when you boot the WinPE.
offlinereg page, download is on first post: http://reboot.pro/to...527-offlinereg/
How to use offlinereg for this task:
Downloat and extract it in a folder on the root of any drive.
Let's assume the boot.wim is mounted to C:\temp and your current running OS is x64.
Located into offlinereg folder open an elevated Command Promt and copy following line and paste it on the elevated command promt and press ENTER.
offlinereg-win64 "C:\temp\Windows\System32\config\system" " " import diskmod-1.reg
Once it finished, copy/paste now following line and press ENTER.
offlinereg-win64 "C:\temp\Windows\System32\config\system" " " import diskmod-2.reg
Now close all open windows, Dism is very prone to failures if there is any window open, and dismount the boot.wim file commiting/saving changes.
You may use this boot.wim into a folder (or directly renamed as WinPE-ABC-x64.wim as an example) to boot using Windows bootmanager or you can rebuild your ISO using a program as UltraIso or similar, delet first the old boot.wim and add the new one and rebuild the ISO.
Now when you boot from the WinPE the USB stick, SD or MicroSD will be treated as a fixed disk.
EDIT:
- Attached a picture of and old 7pe_x86_E.iso with dismod Filter Driver added using this procedure, where U-BOOT and U-NTFS are the two partitions of the USB stick.
- To include diskmod in new builds made from 7 or 8.x sources, Please see Diskmod.script: http://reboot.pro/to...-diskmodscript/
alacran