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WinPE 2.x Convert.exe Works for XP but not 2K Workstations


WreX

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I'm trying to automate the conversion from FAT32 to NTFS on all of our old workstations. I've decided to do this by automating a reboot into WinPE 2.1 running in RAM so that there are no files in-use, which would cause the convert.exe execution in Windows to display more than a prompt for the volume name, and thus kill my automation. The Vista Boot Loader is installed and used to boot to Windows 2000/XP or a standard WIM image. I add another entry for the special conversion WIM and configure a one-time boot with bcdedit's "-bootsequence" flag.

Here's the baffling part: Windows XP workstations have no problem performing the conversion. When PE's convert.exe is run on a Windows 2000 workstation, it prompts for the volume name, then acts just like chkdsk doing a disk check and never converts anything! I tried running the convert.exe file included with 2000 and XP in PE but it does nothing. However, the drives can be converted no problem when in Win2K.

Does this make any sense? Could the file allocation table used by 2K be the cause? I tried several experiments like putting XP's NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM in place, reverting the boot sector with bootsect /nt52, and all I can think of is something is up with the file allocation table. Any thoughts?

Edited by WreX
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Ok, I jumped to conclusions on this one and it does (sort of) make sense. Most of the workstations I was testing on were already loaded with XP and the two oldest ones had Win2K. I found that even after installing XP on the old workstations they still couldn't convert FAT32 to NTFS in WinPE, but if the other workstations were running Win2K the conversion worked. It turned out to be the hard drives in the old workstations I first tested on, so this issue does, in some manner, make sense.

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