WES7 + EWF - boot from read-only USB?

Hi all,

I've been experimenting with trying to get WES7, after successfully installing it onto a USB - to boot from the same USB after flipping its "hardware read-only switch" on, on a diskless computer.

The USB read-only status is controlled by a physical switch (much like with CF cards) - so the moment i flip it on, it won't accept writes.

I've configured EWF to work in RAM REG mode, which works fine as long as the USB is not switched to read-only - and the behavior is 'read-only' since all changes go to RAM and are dumped upon reboot.

Yet, if I switch the USB read-only on, it will BSOD on boot with 0x0000006B consistently.

After doing some reading on the two different EWF modes - RAM and RAM Reg, it seems like both of them still require writable media to be present to store the "EWF volume" (e.g. either 'unpartitioned space on the disk' in RAM mode, or the 'system's registry' in RAM Reg mode) - http://msdn.microsof...=winembedded.60)

So, unless there is a way to somehow force the "EWF Volume" to reside in RAM as well, it seems like it will not be possible to boot from a hardware-read-only-USB on a diskless computer (with no writable disks that could be used as the "EWF Volume").

• Is the above correct?
• Is there a known way to force the EWF volume to also reside in RAM?
• Any workarounds to boot the OS from RAM?

Thanks!

I have never used EWF, but i have tryed to put a non-wim PE on a read only USB-Stick.
Though the PE worked fine from a CD, it would BSOD on the stick.

The difference turned out to be, that while the stick is read only just like the CD, the files do not get automaticly the read-only attribute like on the CD.

So i gave the read-only attribute to all the files on the stick, before switching it to write-protect mode and the PE worked from the stick just as well as from CD.