Confusion over best practice: Disk-EWF cloned deployment

[jimt]

Hi; I have found at least three recipes for deploying a disk-ewf image with
the cloning component. No wonder this topic attracts so many posts.

- XPe Help suggests leaving EWF off until the final target. Then
ConfigureEwf is
manually called to create the EWF partition ("rundll32 ewfdll.dll
ConfigureEwf")

- Sean Liming's "Supplemental Toolkit" has an example where EWF is set in TD
to be
enabled as FBA begins it's first pass. A custom DLL is used to commit any
last
minute changes before fbreseal, and presumably the deployed image comes up
on
the final target with EWF still on.

- The Windows XP Embedded Resource Kit manually enables EWF just before
fbreseal, and then manually recreate the EWF volume using ConfigureEwf

If EWF is enabled when the cloned image is booted on a final target, won't
all the rewritten SIDs on the (in my case) NTFS filesystem be write-cached?
Maybe that is why the official XPe help recipe says to hold off on EWF
startup until the final target is booted off the cloned image.

If you want to deploy a FP2007 disk-EWF cloned image, what recipe do you
use? The goal is to minimize or eliminate manual operations on the final
target machines.

Seems like you would want to run without EWF thru and including the time
when you type "fbreseal", and include a "runonce" script to fire up EWF-disk
on the final target when it first boots. The only question is whether or
not the EWF would start before the SID value was changed and written to the
drive?

Reactions would be most welcome, thank you,

 

[Guest]

Hi,

I have as well a problem with Disk-EWF deployment.
I use XPe SP1 and I tried the third technique described above.

But I can't create manually the EWF partition using ConfigureEwf.
It returns "Ewfopen returns Invalide Handle Value"
"ConfigureEwf() End, status = 0x57" whereas with the same configuration in
the partitions, ConfigureEwf succeeds during FBA.

Thank you for your help

 

[jimt]

I can point you to some docs I used in researching my initial post, but I am
still soliciting feedback from anyone on best practices for the EWF
deployment.


For your situation, I found this SP2 XPe documentation helpful. However it
is not updated for FP2007 apparently:

"Microsoft Windows XP Embedded SP2 Resource Kit"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...e2-fcef-49c2-87ac-cebe233a5f8d&DisplayLang=en

This contains several useful documents:
1_Overview_and_Evaluation.doc
2_Development_Guide.doc
3_Embedded_Enabling_Features.doc
4_Troubleshooting_Guide.doc
5_Servicing_Guide.doc
Installing_DotNet_Framework.doc
XPE SP2 Component Manifest.XLS

Look in the third one, see that you follow the guidelines for partitioning
the HDD for EWF-disk. I found the resource kit by doing a websearch on
"Embedded" with the phrase "Resource Kit" on the microsoft.com domain.

Also I would review the partitioning guidelines for EWF in the XPe help
screens.