Deployment question relate to SDILoader

[Guest]

Hi,

I was so thrilled to build my XPE image, tested, added cloning component,
FBA- resealed and then went through the complicated deployment process of
using WinPE/SDI. I was so happy to see the XPE boot up without error in the
target machine. But when I looked at the capacity of the target machine hard
drive by using Windows Explorer and Disk Management tool, I was surprised to
see it had only about 1GB but I remember I used DISKPART to create the
partition 149Gigs (C:\Drive and formatted with NTFS). It appears the
capacity I had was because of the size I specified when I used SDILoader to
create the virtual driver. I thought great, I can change the size of my
virtual SDI drive to 10 Gig and see. Then when I copied my FBA-resealed
image to the virtual drive, I got an error "E:\ is not accessible. The
parameter is incorrect". It appears the SDILoader can take a size of about
1Gig or lower. My development tool is XPE SP2. My questions are

1) Why did SDILoader have such a small specified size and that limited the
capacity of my target deployment hard drive?

2) How can I make C:\ drive capacity in my target machine from 1 Gig to
149Gig so that it is consistent with the creation of the partition by
DISKPART?

3)How do I test the effectiveness of the cloning tool in my image? Where do
I check the Security ID (SID)?

Thanks a lot.

 

[Sean Liming \(MVP\)]

If your system supports booting from USB flash disk, you can create an image
that boots to XPe form a USB flash disk and then partition and format the
drive. Finally, copy the image to be placed on the drive from a local folder
or from a network share.

Security IDs can be found in the Registry -- look under HKEY_USERS
S-1-5-21-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. These will be different for each clone.

Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental Toolkit

 

[Guest]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for your help. I have figured out the problem "E:\ is not
accessible. The parameter is incorrect". It was because the formatting of
SDI drive wasn't complete right after using New Partition Wizard in Computer
Management. The Computer(Disk) Management showed an ambiguous message on E:
drive "Formatting (100%)". I thought it was 100% completion but it wasn't.
Now I wait for message changed to " XXX MB NTFS Healthy" message come up.
The formatting time for my 50 Gig partition is about 35 minutes. It takes
patience for "Healthy" message come up.

But I will try your USB flash disk option as an alternative deployment method.

Thanks