Access drives from WinPE

[stamat]

Hello,

I've been reading and learning a lot during the last week. I made my WinPE cd and I can boot it all working fine. However, I cannot browse to other drives than x:\. The purpose of doing it is to restore my factory install of vista (imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:\)

I made another win pe dvd where i put the factory.wim in the mount folder, so that it can appear in x:\ drive when booted. But i guess it requires too much RAM to be able to load it (I have 4.0gb RAM on my computer).

How should I proceed? At least how can I browse to an external HDD or to the cd-rom after booting winPE?

Thanks in advance!!

[IcemanND]

You can put your image at the root of the DVD that way it doesn't load to memory.

As far as reading external or internal drives, if it is not reading the USB drive try adding the chipset drivers to the image or you can load them after booting to test. For internal drives try adding the SATA controller drivers.

[stamat]

Hi IcemanND,

I tried with putting the image at the root of the DVD, but when it is not loaded to memory i do not have access to it, as i do not have access to my cd-rom in boot environment, ONLY to x:

Can you point me to where to find these drivers and how to add them to the dvd?

Thanks for the reply!

PS: My C: and D: drives on the laptop are NTFS. Is that a problem?

Edited February 8, 2009 by stamat

[IcemanND]

I've only had issues accessing encrypted drives when booted from a WinPE 2 cd. If it is booting from your cd/dvd there should be a drive letter for the CD/DVD.

Check out my guide here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=101383 driver installation is on page 8.

[stamat]

Ok then, can I ask what (dos) commands you use to access your cd/dvd or hdd when in boot environment?

[IcemanND]

just change to the drive letter. If you are not sure what it is you can type:

echo list volume|diskpart

And it will list all the assigned drive letters:

Microsoft DiskPart version 5.1.3565

Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: LAPTOP1-XP

DISKPART>
  Volume ###  Ltr  Label		Fs	 Type		Size	 Status	 Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0	 D   THE_ART_OF_  UDF	DVD-ROM	 1695 MB
  Volume 1	 C   main		 NTFS   Partition	149 GB  Healthy	System
  Volume 2	 F				NTFS   Removeable  7680 MB

DISKPART>

[stamat]

Thanks so much IcemanND,

I just tried to boot the dvd again and all worked fine. I guess it's different in testing condition, when using VirtualBox. Anyway, it's all fine now!