Whenever I connect an external storage device after bootup into BartPE no drive letters are assigned. I have checked Computer Management and it is shown there. It is also seen by Symantec Ghost and Partition Magic. I can manually assign a letter via Computer Management but it doesn't seem to take effect. Any help here?

P.S. here is my setup (or at least part of it)...

BartPE
XPE 1.07 plugin w/ MMC plugin enabled
HWPnP plugin
Wireless Zero Config plugin

If there is a different way to assign the letters that does work then let me know

HINT: So why don't you plug in the device BEFORE you boot to PE?

DW

The reason is that I boot from a USB flash drive. The system doesn't allow for me to pick which USB drive to boot from and I would have more than one bootable device connected if I were to hook all of them up.

P.S. - I use the PE2USB installer so it gets on there as a "HD" install. My system will boot the USB flash drive in HDD emulation mode. I found out it worked really well when my Windows 98 based one booted up and the splash screen came up...

The helpfile for the xpe plugin describes how to add the device id's of USB storage devices like that:


second idea:
playing around with an error i had with volsnap.sys i noticed that:

causes the driveletters to disappear in explorer.I didn't check if they also disappeared in diskmanagement.

Hmm... The first one is one I had considered except that I may be taking this to other people's houses and potentially connecting their USB devices in. I won't have the device ID's if that was the case.

The second one sounds interesting. In my case though the drives that are present at the time of bootup are assigned. It is just anything attached after bootup doesn't get assigned a letter. Now then If I use HwPnP to install all the devices and force USB then the drive letters disappear for all except the flash drive and the ramdisk. I can however uninstall and rescan from device manager and they reappear.

Anyways I just rebuilt a new one. This one went to both my flash drive and I made my first CD based build so I will see what happens here.

EDIT: I forgot to mention. The new build I just made integrates in a change I made to the xpe-pnp.inf file. I uncommented the USB filter lines in there. I found a bunch related to USB that were commented out and they all dealt with external USB storage devices. I did it to both USB and CD because I don't know if this will break the ability to boot from USB properly or not.

Pending that doesn't do it I will try the usbhub.sys patch. I had previously slipstreamed the I386 folder with some fixes and one of them affected usbhub.sys. I had reverted those back so it is a straight XP SP2 setup.

Try the new build - hope it is fixed. You should really take care of the upperfilters entries for the device classes. They can cause a lot of trouble.
In my build i added all the device id's of my USB devices i have here and they are working flawlessly.
Please report back if patching of usbhub.sys makes any difference in the behaviour.

Also make sure your plugnplay call doesn't redetect USB-volumes. This will unmount all volumes other than the USB-stick you booted from.

Does XPE require a rebuild to adjust such settings ?

@ponzandro: Well the modification to xpe-pnp.inf made it go from bad to worse. Oh well. I will revert the change.

@sanbarrow: I know about that one. I did sorta mention it earlier that was happening.

Anyways guys I did a test and I wanted to see if the Firewire port was working upon bootup (I know that USB is "working) so I left the Firewire drive connected. Upon bootup I found that I could access all the files on it. So the "Unknown device" entries may be working after all. Just seems alot of it might be a glitch with the way it is implemented in BartPE. Noting that my Aircard is still not working I am not really worried about that one right now. My next build is going to include the patched usbhub.sys file. I usually have PEBuilder create the setup without creating an iso or burning a CD. Then I follow with InfBuildCache so that the inf files are pre-cached (helps to speed up PnP) then I create my own iso afterwards so that it include the inf cache file on it.

InfCacheBuild %CD%\BartPE
start /b /i /wait /normal mkisofs.exe -duplicates-once -sort sort.txt -iso-level 4 -volid WindowsXPE -b bootsect.bin -boot-load-size 4 -no-emul-boot -hide bootsect.bin -hide boot.catalog -o %CD%\iso\test.iso %CD%\BartPE

Please note that %CD% is a system variable and is automagically replaced with the current directory. InfCacheBuild is found in the Build Scripts for Windows XPE but I don't use the wrapper.cmd file in it.

It's also a separate download. You might find this thread of interest. InfCacheBuild 2.0

Heres how I get around that issue simply

Boot from your usb as you do, insert your PHDD as usual
Right click my computer
Click on manage (only available to adminstrators )
Click on disk management
On the panel indicating the status of your PHDD ( i.e. heathly active ) right click and change drive letter and path..
Give it a drive letter
Right click and open your PHDD through the same panel under the same menu

Hello

Maybe try this:

http://www.kare-net.de/Download/MountStorPe.zip

Plug the external storage and give Bartpe time (3-5 seconds) to install the Storage driver.
Next launch "Mount Storage PE".

Greetings

-Kare-

Thanks for the input guys. I will take a look into those things when I get a minute.

I am working on rebuilding part of the BartPE setup that I have and in addition I have just gotten done with an experimental install of XP (not a BartPE or WinPE -- Full XP) on a USB device. The nice thing is that it seems to work well with the exception of an issue with a working swapfile. It booted up fine otherwise and no dreaded 7B error. The trick was making the USB driver a requirement for booting and get it loaded earlier in the sequence. USB-HDD support in the bios helps of course.

@4x³-3x²+2x-7=dropout: That may work from the management area but unfortunately it doesn't seem to work anywhere else unless it makes it show up for other applications.

@kare: looks promising. I will include it in my next build and see what happens. Still trying to get the video drivers in there too. Would be nice to have decent laptop video drivers along with my network ones.

EDIT: Ok. The usbhub.sys fix doesn't seem to do anything although I'll leave it there anyways as it may play a role behind the scenes. kare's suggestion has done the trick however. If I connect the drive up I can run that utility to have all partitions assigned a drive letter. It will even assign a drive letter to the diagnostics partition on my laptop. Note that this partition is not normally assigned a letter since it uses a special, Dell only, partition type. It is standard Fat32 otherwise . Now I did find that I had to have HwPnP detect devices before I could mount anything although that was all I had to do. USB worked right away. Firewire had to be detected though. This build also included in a crap load of network and mass storage drivers. This will increase portability so much it isn't even funny. I used the BartPE Mass Storage driver pack plugin from Driverpacks.com and the UBCD4Win Network Drivers Addon pack v2.02 found in their forum.

Now then how do I get HwPnP detect devices during the bootup phase so I don't have to do it manually? Doing that and this setup will be near complete and very portable from what I can tell.

P.S. - If anyone has any hints on video driver pack then I would be game to it. If possible it should work on both laptops and desktops. I have been living with the vgasave driver that this setup has been using for now since it does technically "work".

Try the "Universal Video Driver":
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/Universal-...driver-f60.html
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19325

jaclaz

@kare
Some interesting stuff on your site.
I'm eager to see how your driver import pe works out.

Thanks. The main thing with getting rid of the vgasave driver is to replace it with something that will remove the lag in the video. The lack of resolution is not an issue as my intention is really as a recovery tool. I've transitioned 100% of the functionality of my DOS based one over to my new BartPE based one and I have added USB and Firewire support which is something I did not have before. Based on the information in the posts above the universal driver does not remove the lag because it is caused by the lack of video acceleration in the driver.

@kare: Any chance of a localized english version of MountStorPe?

P.S. - I have made HwPnP autorun from the startup group. Took too long in the startup

If you are looking for a Recovery only solution, you might want to keep an eye on this:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20870
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3717
very, and I mean VERY experimental, but it is slowly starting to be working, and I do not see making it bootable from USB impossible, expecially with the support of Dietmar.

About Universal VBE, just try it:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...=2325&st=24


jaclaz

Ok. I'm willing to give vbemp a go but I don't have a clue as to how to install the drivers so everything uses them. Can you give me some input on this? Thanks.

Read the linked to thread:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19325
there is a "base" plugin and a few .inf files (which need however to be customized)

jaclaz

Duh!

I got the plugin and I am going to try it out. It is implemented into my next build along with a fix for the HwPnP startup since I moved it to the startup group. I also took out the auto ramdisk resize bit for now.

EDIT: I've implemented the driver but the package had an old release so I updated it to the 10/19/2007 one that is on the website. I know it is a debug version. I'll get the release one from him when I get a chance. I've made the scan from within the PE environment.