2 replies to this topic

[sbaeder]

OK, I have been playing with this for a day or two, and while I have gotten the basics to work (BIG THANKS to Steve6375 and the whole RMPrepUSB site, and to ALL the others here), I am having an issue with both performance of some tools and also the basics in the "Disk Manager".

The problem I would like to solve is to be able to access a PE based ISO when that ISO is booted off a USB or other form (even an ISO file on an ISO?) so that if the PE has part of the content in the Boot.wim, and part on the PE iso, it will still work.

So...what I have I done/tried. I used the Tutorial43 approach, and used Firadisk to access parameters passed from grub4dos, and automated this all as a driver script. In the script, I stor the driver code, and create a mini version of the "load.cmd" that was used in the RMPrepUSB tutorial 43. It uses devcon (or devcon64) to load the driver. Firadisk picks up the parameters from the mapped grub4dos parameters. I place a call to the load.cmd file at the start of the winpeshl.ini so it is loaded before the cdusb.exe and the other PnP drivers, and shortcuts, etc.

This seems to work out just fine!!! (again, thanks to all)...EXCEPT, there are some sort of timeouts happening. For example, using BGINFO.script, which puts the BGINFO files on the "CD" (or the "Y" drive). The files are there, RunBGInfo.exe starts up to delay the start until after the network is running, BUT, since the info I am trying to display has in it the disk sizes and the amount of free space, BGInfo seems to hang (for about 90 seconds), and the Firadisk (now mapped as the "Y" CD drive, pointing the ISO file) is not listed. The CD *does* show up fine in explorer! But not on the BGInfo display...

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Also, if I go into the management console, and try to select Disk Manager, it seems to hang (forever?) when trying to loading the information. Other info...

Acts the same on 32 or 64 bit versions...I am using SP1 as the source (ultimate), using the latest version of the FiraDisk (0.0.1.30) and using the standard options in the WIn7PE_SE project. I can try it with other options if anyone has any ideas here...

menu.lst info

title 1 INSTALL Windows 7-x64 PE\nThis will install any edition of Windows 32-bit to your hard disk

debug off

set MYISO=win7pe_x64.iso

map --mem (md)0x800+4 (99)

map /ISO/%MYISO% (0xff)

map --hook

write (99) [FiraDisk]\nStartOptions=cdrom,vmem=find:/ISO/%MYISO%;\n\0

chainloader (0xff)/BOOTMGR || chainloader (0xff)

load.cmd created

@Echo off

Echo "Wait while we load FiraDisk driver"

cd /d "%ProgramFiles%\Firadisk"

devcon64.exe  install firadisk.inf   root\firadisk

echo "Waiting until ISO is loaded..."

timeout /T 5 /nobreak

*note: script includes the timeout.exe from the source, and that works fine...

Any/all ideas welcome...

[sbaeder]

OK, further update and PARTIAL solution...

I was using virtualbox to do the testing, even with the USBFlash - using the "trick" where you map the physical drive to a RAW vmdk...So, I decided to go boot the HW in native mode, and that seemed to work OK...There was still some "lag" on BGInfo - but only about 4-5 seconds after the RunBGInfo stopped after the network was started. And the Disk Management worked and it did see the FiraDisk drive mapped to the ISO file.

I *DID* also make a change to have the HwPnP start automatically and had that script also run the wpeinit process...so, that might have helped...Will run one more test on the virtualbox setup now just to confirm...

I probably should have tried REAL HW sooner...

Anyway, maybe this can be a lessone/warning for others...1st rule of debugging a problem: SIMPLIFY and ELIMINATE as much as possible...

[laddanator]

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