RAMDISK Image

H

Harald Jennerich

If I try to format my IDE drive partition 1 from XPE bootet from Ramdisk my
XPE Build complains that i am not allowed to format a System or Boot
device.

My XPE Recovery RAMDISK includes regedit.exe and reg.exe.When I change the
registry key
HLKM\System\Setup\SystemPartition from Device\HarddiskVolume1 to another
value I can see with the diskpart utility, that the attribute "Systemdrive"
immediately disappears but instead the attribute "Bootdrive" appears.

Changing .HLKM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Systembootdevice from
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partiton(1) to ramdisk(0) has not effect which can be
immediately verified with diskpart.

How can I remove the association to the Systembootdevice ?

I cant believe that my image is properly build because I boot from network
and do not need any harddisk to come up
( no pagefile ). Only when FBA was run the harddisk was invloved . And now i
struggle to dicard the contents of this harddisk..

When I copy the contents of the prepared harddisk to the SDI Image I run
reg.exe to load a hive inside the SDI Image where I remove obsolete settings
under HKLM\MountedDevices.
..
I guess that it is neccessary to change some of the above mentioned keys
also.

It would be no problem to change the value of
HLKM\System\Setup\SystemPartition, but I dont know how what is the correct
setting for a RAMDISK.

Perhaps Slobodan saw same problem when he boots his RAMDISK Image from CD ?

Kind regards

Harald Jennerich


..
 
S

Slobodan Brcin

Hi Harald,
Perhaps Slobodan saw same problem when he boots his RAMDISK Image from CD
?
Good guess :)

This is the first and only problem I had to solve to make it work as I
intended it to work :)
I think that I have posted few things on this subject, but never full
solution.

Probably there is cleaner way to do this, but hardly that there is for me.

I have made minlogon based build very light with only few generic drivers
required to run FBA, and to support all file systems with of course support
for ramdisk

Then I have eradicated many registry entries from system hive that was
offline.

MountedDevices emptied.

Control\Class - Was entry that I have erased greatly.
- System Devices now contain only three entries.
- Logical Disk Manager
- Plug And Play Software Device Enumerator
- Microcode Update Device
- Mouse
- Microsoft PS/2 Mouse
- Keyboard
- Standard 101/102 ....

Mouse and keyboard can be removed if you use USB mouse and keyboard.

I don't know what I have removed from Enum and Services (maybe some
entries).

Also I had to delete mshdc.inf to resolve some hardware conflicts with
detection and installation of HDD.

When you boot XPe prepared like this from SDI file, it will do PnP
installation of drivers for hardware from scratch and it should work on
different platforms.
You will have access to display, keyboard, mouse, HDD, CD, USB, etc.
diskpart wont give you troubles since it sees new disk that was not present
during the boot.
also you can use format to format disk, and deploy new image to disk.

In any case you must ensure that XPe don't require reboot during the boot.

If you are making automated install this is very good solution, since you
can deploy or update new image without any human intervention.

Regards,
Slobodan
 

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