I'm having trouble setting up a BartPE to recognize the ExpressCard slot of a new IBM WinXPsp2 laptop (and then the eSATA card in it). I don't know what I'm doing wrong, and hours of hunting through archives & Google didn't helping me figure out what I'm not understanding.

1. I already set up the drivers for an eSATA card in folder under the SCSIAdapter folder. It's hard to imagine I did anything wrong there. I just copied over the files from the mfr's disk and edited its TxtSetup.oem to remove the OS versions other than XP. (Naturally, when I test my BartPE boot disk I have the eSata drive all powered up & connected, but so far only a WinXP full boot recognizes it, not BartPE.)
   
   
2. The device manager on the laptop doesn't seem to refer to ExpressCard explicitly, but there is clearly is a "PCMCIA adapters" device called "Ricoh R/RL/5C476(II) or Compatible CardBus controller" which is using \WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS\pcmcia.sys. So I copied that pcmcia.sys into the BARTPE\i386\System32\DRIVERS folder, and copied the related pcmcia.inf and pcmcia.pnf into the i386\INF folder as I've seen suggested. There were no other pcmcia* files on the laptop. I then edited the .inf file to include the normal pebuilder-like lines near the top as shown below.

Unfortunately, running pebuilder then overwrote the BARTPE folders, removing the files I manually added, so it seems maybe I need to put these somewhere else, but I don't know where or how. How do I handle this?

• 2a. Should I set up a folder with the 3 files under SCSCIAdapater? But those seem to require a TxtSetup.oem file which I don't have & can't guess how to make.
  
• 2b. Should I somehow make pebuilder skip the step of regenerating the BARTPE folder contents after I've manually put the pcmcia files in the right places like I did in step 2 above? (And then remember to recopy the files into there each time I have to regenerate a new BARTPE image.)
  
• 2c. Or maybe I should just drop these pcmcia 3 files in a PLUGIN folder? I'd guess that would require some other file I don't have & don't know how to make.

CraiginNJ

PS -- I won't have time to experiment again for a week or so, but I hope someone can set me straight before then.

Isn't there anybody out there who can explain exactly where pcmcia drivers are supposed to be put (and whatever else is needed) so they get included in the BartPE disk?

They go in the PEBuilder plugin folder. Look for PEBuilder's Help section on plugins.

Thanks, Ed. I put the pcmcia .inf, .pnf, and .sys files in the PlugIn folder where the PEBuilder recognized and enabled them and I can see that they've been put in the normal places on the BartPE CD. I'm glad to have that beginner step behind me.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to do the trick. I'm still missing something. When booted from the BartPE, I cannot see my . . .

• external eSATA drive which is connected through the -->
• SIIG eSATA ExpressCard (whose drivers I had set up via the PEBuilders's SCSIAdapter folder), which is plugged into the -->
• ExpressCard/PCMCIA card slot (whose drivers were set up via the PlugIn folder)

My next step will be to add a Device Manager plugin (just learned about them being separate plugins) in the hope that will give a clue to what's missing or failing.

Craig in NJ

There's been other discussions here about SATA drives, you may find some useful info doing a Search of the BartPE forums. I don't have SATA drives so I can't give you more specific information.

Things that might help are running infCacheBuild before creating the ISO and after booting BartPE running HWPnP. Those steps help me with various Intel graphics problems.

PS - It is feeling kind of hopeless (or maybe it's just me). So close, yet so far.

Paraglider Update Driver didn't help much - it listed a lot of "Other Devices" that didn't have drivers, but didn't give any clue what those devices might be.

The PCMCIA slot and the eSATA ExpressCard might be working, though. I can see those two drivers were loaded according to Paraglider's Update Driver, and the card's LED's even flickered once while BartPE was booting like it does with WinXPpro.

But the eSATA hard disk on the end of the cable still isn't recognized under BartPE (it is recognized under WinXPpro), and I can't find anything in Paraglider's Update Driver list that looks like a disabled hard disk.

I may have to give up until someone more experienced figures out their solution to recognizing an eSATA drive via ExpressCard and shares how they did it.

Thanks,

Craig in NJ

Yes, PE does load pcmcia.sys driver by default.



Didn't exist a BARTPE\i386\System32\DRIVERS\pcmcia.sys already?

I don't have access to a Express Card.
How to support unknown hardware?

Which hardware do you use? There are different laptops and eSATA cards.
Which new laptop and eSATA card do you use?
IBM/Lenovo offers drivers to download, do you have a URL?

What's Hardware Id's of your Express Card slot?
'devcon hwids *' list Hardware ID's and Compatible ID's.
Open file txtsetup.sif, goto [HardwareIdsDatabase].Does a HardwareId match your hardware?

eSATA card drivers are the next step.

I stumbled into the answer. Actually I tried two at the same time and am not sure which one made the difference:

• 1. In addition the the driver files for the eSATA card drive (eSATA RAID card, actually - SI3132r5.sys, etc), I also added the driver files for the manufacturer's non-RAID version of the card (SI3232.sys, etc.) to \drivers\SCSIAdapter. This shouldn't have made any difference, though, since I think the full WinXPpro worked fine with only the raid version of the drivers.
  
  
• 2. I also downloaded from Intel and added Intel Matrix Storage Manager Drivers (iastor.sys, etc.) to \drivers\SCSIAdapter. A post in the forum made me suspect that might be needed to recognize a SATA drive. I didn't expect to need Intel drivers for an external hard drive through a SATA card that had its own drivers, but now I think that this is what did the trick.

I can now see and use the external SATA hard disk through the eSATA card via the ExpressCard slot.

I hope my experience helps someone else.

Thank you both for your help (especially Ed_P whose brief tips led me to the solution).

Craig in NJ

PS -- I'm good to go now. I'll eventually want to figure out why the NIC isn't working and test whether BartPE boots faster from a USB flash drive than from the CD-R, but those are for another weekend. I'm still recovering from a truly insane couple of weeks at the office.

Thanks for the update CraiginNJ. We love happy endings.