Nt4 Disk Administrator, Please help test! Options

[chall32]

This is really a response to a question, but if this works as well as I think, then I think it merits a separate thread...

The Question - from HERE

What about a GUI for DiskPart?
This could be a real challenge for you!

Just playing with this, I thought "what about using and existing disk manager or recycling an old disk manager?" Disk Management from Win2k / XP needs MMC - which I don't have in my build How about using NT4's Disk Administrator.... That doesn't need MMC....

Well - blimey it only seems to work in WinPE!!!!!

Just to check that I'm not going potty, I've created a quick plugin fo you all to test… Grab a copy from my website: http://www.chall.plus.com/winpe/

Alternatively, you can just grab a copy of NT4 Disk Administrator from here: ftp://ftp.usask.ca/pub/vendor/microsoft/W...ked/windisk.exe and test…

Please post back and let me know if it works…

This post has been edited by jaclaz: May 13 2008, 06:42 AM

[solara]

Downloaded the exe file, placed it on my external HD with BartPE (built with SP1 with nu2menu/geoshell without XPE or other explorer plugins - but has Visual Basic enabled, and Windows Scripting enabled as well).

WinDisk launches and is able to recognize all drives/partitions and their sizes (but no drive letters, even though they are assigned drive letters at boot up). Plugged in a USB flash drive, and WinDisk correctly identified it, and was able to assign a drive letter to that drive and make it visible to my file manager.

Now for the bizarre stuff: Basically, the way WinDisk and Diskpart handle the partitions seems completely different to each other:

At boot up, my USB external HD and all its partitions are recognized and assigned a letter by default. DiskPart can see all these partitions and their associated drive letters. WinDisk can see the partitions and their sizes but not their assigned drive letters - basically they are 'unassigned' to WinDisk (but not DiskPart).

When I plug in another USB drive, both WinDisk and DiskPart can see it, but it's unassigned to both initially. If I assign the drive using Windisk, Diskpart still sees it as 'unassigned'. If I assign the drive using DiskPart, then WinDisk still sees it as unassigned. Assigning the drive using either program does enable the drive to be recognized and manipulated with any file manager.

So basically WinDisk does seem to work (but I haven't tested out all the functions) from my BartPE built with 3.13, nu2menu/geoshell. But the way it handles partitions seems different than the way DiskPart handles it - I have no idea the how's/why's.

[jaclaz]

Very nice idea.

I am too experimenting a little bit in the way NT/2k/XP assign/mount drives.

It seems like there are more then one where the info is written in the Registry, one is this
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

but there MUST be others, if I mount an image file with VDKVirtual Drive driver, it gets a letter, can be accessed allright, but is nowhere to be seen in either diskpart and Win2k Disk Management.
Virtual CD ROMs by Alcohol and CloneCD are instead seen by Disk Management.


I found here:
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/226/06/8.html

Tools and Resources: Although it is normally difficult to insert or remove (mount and unmount) NTFS volumes during a Windows NT session safely, utilities are available that let you do this. One such utility is the Mnt/Unmount freeware utility.

Description of Resource
Mnt/Unmount for Windows NT is a freeware volume mount/unmount utility that helps with the safe insertion and removal of volumes in Windows NT, including volumes formatted as NTFS.

Author
Christoph H. Hochstaetter

Where to Find It
Mnt/Unmount for Windows NT can be found at the following FTP site:
ftp://ftp.csusm.edu/pub/winworld/nt/unmnt10.zip

(last link is not valid anymore, but I got the file from here:
http://www.bookcase.com/library/software/w....util.disk.html

Mirror here:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/unmnt10.zip

I tested it on my Win2k system and gives different numbering of partitions from DISKPART.
As the utility is quite old, probably the latter is compatible with the NT4 Windisk.

The usask.ca ftp seems not working at the moment, I'll have to find my old copy of NT4 SP6a to extract the file.

jaclaz

This post has been edited by jaclaz: May 13 2008, 06:58 AM

[chall32]

@solara & jaclaz

Thanks for trying this out!!!

I too seem to have experienced the same drive letter "funnyness" as you guys But using Mnt/Unmount, this looks to be fixed.... (I think)

Here's what I did:

1. Unmount C:by running unmount.exe C:
2. Check that C: mapping has gone by running mnt.exe
3. Run Windisk.exe and make whatever changes you need to (remember C: mapping won't show up in Windisk)
4. Re-mount C:\ by running mnt.exe C: Device\Harddisk0\Partition1
5. Check that C: mapping has gone by running mnt.exe

What do you think?

I've put a copy of unmnt10.zip up on my website: http://www.chall.plus.com/winpe/unmnt10.zip

[solara]

Btw, just found that Paragon HDM6 mounts/unmounts volumes the same way as WinDisk. If I mount a new drive/partition with HDM6, it will show up and is recognized by WinDisk - but will not show up in Diskpart.

All file managers can recognize/manipulate the drive after being mounted by HDM6 or WinDisk or Diskpart.

Interestingly, on boot-up, HDM6 will recognize all the drives/partitions that were automatically recognized which Diskpart also recognizes (but WinDisk does not).

[Wendy]

Hi

I found that while i could assign the cdrom drives under windisk.exe under 2k, they did not stick. I had to use the win2k version. Note that the version i used is the vers 6a from a live nt4sp6a machine (that i can look at with bartpe.)

Wendy

[Wendy]

A more recent, and supported utility for this is ntsubst. You can subst active partitions, to something else, and it uses only documented calls. You can also unmount partitions.

Suppose you have a 500MB fat c:/ for a multiboot situation. You get these cdroms that expect to write huge files to c:

ntsubst c: l:\drivec

will do the trick.

ntsubst works on all windows, and is free, see zB its web-site (which has also a handy services-gui wrapper that run under winpe

http://www.hhdsoftware.com/

W