Updating XPe in the field with a USB thumb drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Quentin
  • Start date Start date
Q

Quentin

Has anyone had any eXPerience with this? Can it be done? Other than making
sure my motherboard supports booting off removeable media, what else do I
have to take in to consideration?

Quentin.
 
That XPe by default does not support boot from USB. And that you will have to lose some time without guaranties that it will boot
from USB at the end.

Or you can boot from RAM. Use ntldr to load SDI file to memory and then boot. (Your image must fit in ram and leave some space for
XPe to work)
Or you can make or use DOS applications to reimage HDD.

Best regards,
Slobodan
 
Thanks for your information Slobodan.

I guess my actual questions are more broader than I asked, sorry about that.
Also, I should warn that I am a bit of a newbie; although not totally
because I fooled around with XPe quite extensively 2 years ago (pre SP1),
but have since forgotten most of what I learned.

What I really want to know is how do people upgrade their XPe devices in the
field?

I've read that some people use an El Torito CD which upgrades their machine.
Is this the main way to do it? What is on the El Torito CD's that actually
does the upgrading? Is it some sort of OS that runs an application that
just copies files off the CD over the corresponding ones on the hard drive?

Since my device will probably not have a CD-ROM (which I am campaigning for,
but to no avail) the only other thing that I could think of was a USB thumb
drive; hence my original question. Can I do a similar trick to the El
Torito CD on a USB drive?

Quentin.


Slobodan Brcin (eMVP) said:
That XPe by default does not support boot from USB. And that you will have
Click to expand...
to lose some time without guaranties that it will boot
from USB at the end.

Or you can boot from RAM. Use ntldr to load SDI file to memory and then
Click to expand...
boot. (Your image must fit in ram and leave some space for
 
Hi Quentin,

You have three popular methods bassed on medium.
1. Network.
2. El-torito CD
3. External devices (USB, ....)


All these mediums can be used for updating your image.

Then you have two options:
1. Run time image update where XPe updates itself trough DUA service.
2. Offline reimaging by using secondary OS or propriatery code.

Depending on OS choice.
1. You can use temporary XPe that can be made to boot on your device from any of mediums 1,2,3.
2. You can use DOS and some of reimaging utility made for dos.
3. You can make your small boot program few hundred of bytes long that would do raw data read and write to disk.

You should aim on RAM boot solution that is basicaly same as with remote network boot solution. Boot if from SDI file that is first
loded in memory.

For all those topics you can find discussions and answers in this NG:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...F-8&group=microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded

Best regards,
Slobodan
 
We currently are delivering our embedded device with USB thumb drive
re-installation support.

I'm using a variation of Slobodan's RAM boot solution. The device BIOS has
USB-boot capabilities. The RAM image runs headless, and we use remote
desktop to access it. We than use Windows Backup, diskpart and format to
backup and restore the contents of the main drive. Our main drive is a CF
card with a EWF-protected boot partition and a small data partition. We
also have a utility to initialize the thumb drive from any Windows machine.
The same utility can be used to initialize the CF card if you pull it from
the device.

So, yes, it works.

--
Regards.
Mark K Vallevand
Slobodan Brcin (eMVP) said:
Hi Quentin,

You have three popular methods bassed on medium.
1. Network.
2. El-torito CD
3. External devices (USB, ....)


All these mediums can be used for updating your image.

Then you have two options:
1. Run time image update where XPe updates itself trough DUA service.
2. Offline reimaging by using secondary OS or propriatery code.

Depending on OS choice.
1. You can use temporary XPe that can be made to boot on your device from any of mediums 1,2,3.
2. You can use DOS and some of reimaging utility made for dos.
3. You can make your small boot program few hundred of bytes long that
Click to expand...
would do raw data read and write to disk.
You should aim on RAM boot solution that is basicaly same as with remote
Click to expand...
network boot solution. Boot if from SDI file that is first
 
If I used a USB thumb drive to update my image, would I have to be able to
fit the entire new image on the drive or just the files that changed? For
that matter, how would I know which files changed??

Quentin.
 
We always restore the entire image if its a new release.

You can boot from the thumb drive and use Windows Backup (include on our
thumb drive) to save as much or as little of the CF device as you want.
When you need to restore the CF, you use Windows Backup to restore as much
or as little as you want. If you need to load a new image, you partition
(diskprep) and format the CF drive and use Windows Backup to restore the
entire CF from the backup file we supply. Then, you restore the
'personality' files you backed up. We keep the personality files on the
second partition on the CF drive. We try to document all the procedures and
make things pretty easy for the customer or support engineer.
 
Thanks for all your help Mark :)

I have one more question: Is your "Windows Backup upgrade procedure"
automated or is there user interaction? If it isn't, do you think it could
be?

I'd like to be able to take the load off tech support; my users are bound to
screw up an upgrade if it isn't automated.

Quentin.
 
Windows Backup is not automated. Windows Backup (Ntbackup.exe) can be
scripted for backup, but must be run with its GUI for restore. :-( So, we
document the procedures for backup, partition and format, and restore. We
experimented with WinZip and its command line tool, and although it
automates nicely for backup and restore, it does not save file security
settings. So we went with Windows Backup, which does save file security
information.
 
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