WinFE - SANPolicy and NoAutoMount Combinations

I put together some test results a while ago - following WinFE tests in a virtual environment. My results/findings are posted here.

I've been doing some work with WinFE 5.0 and thought it might be useful to post my results when different combinations of SANPolicy and NoAutoMount registry values are used.

A quick reminder about the SAN policy values used in WinFE -

SAN policy 3 - Doesn't mount storage devices.
SAN policy 4 - New for Windows 8. Makes internal disks offline. Note. All external disks and the boot disk are online.

NoAutoMount 1 - will disable automounting - basically drives will not be allocated drive letters.

My tests were carried out using a Lenovo X200 Thinkpad. At the time of the tests the laptop had 1x internal drive (SATA), 1x Removable Disk type UFD, 1x Fixed Disk type UFD and 1x external USB HDD (SATA Drive connected via an external USB caddy).

The Fixed Disk type UFD was the boot device.


SANPolicy=3 (NoAutoMount not configured)

Internal Disk -
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE

UFD (Removable Disk) -  
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE

UFD (Fixed Disk) -  
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : C:

External USB HDD -
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE


SANPolicy=3 NoAutoMount=1

Internal Disk -
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE

UFD (Removable Disk) -  
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE

UFD (Fixed Disk) -  
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : NONE

External USB HDD -
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE


SANPolicy=4 (NoAutoMount not configured)

Internal Disk -
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE

UFD (Removable Disk) -  
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : D:

UFD (Fixed Disk) -  
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : E:

External USB HDD -
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : C:


SANPolicy=4 NoAutoMount=1

Internal Disk -
Status : Offline (Policy)
Read-only : Yes
Drive Letter : NONE

UFD (Removable Disk) -  
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : C:

UFD (Fixed Disk) -  
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : NONE

External USB HDD -
Status : Online
Read-only : No
Drive Letter : NONE


Conclusion

Any disk marked as Offline during the boot process also had a readonly flag - it was not possible to remove this flag using DiskPart whether SANPolicy 3 or 4 was used.

WinFE behaved as I expected with the majority of these combinations of settings - the exception being when SANPolicy=4 was used in conjunction with NoAutoMount=1. I was surprised to see one of the devices was mounted as drive C: - this being the UFD (Removable Disk type). Are all Removable Type disks mounted if these settings are used?

Regards,

Misty

Nice experiment!

 

Loosely connected (just for reference):

http://www.msfn.org/...ive-on-c-drive/

 

And - blast from the past - :

http://www.joeware.n...eprot/index.htm

http://www.joeware.n...eprot/usage.htm

 

Wonko