For years I've wanted to have Windows PE, as booted from an automation folder, show the real C drive rather than its own ramdrive. I dislike having to use firm.exe and you can't inject drivers using that method. I've finally figured out how to do that
1. Boot to automation PE4x32 in our case
2. Run a script that does the following
F:\Bootwiz\platforms\Windows\x86\Installer\bwiwin.exe -u -quiet -noreboot
diskpart /s f:\scripts\diskpartrescan.txt
3. Note that diskpartrescan.txt just contains a single word "RESCAN" to have PE rescan the drives and get the real partition information
4. Hey look, you now have drive letters for your real partitions! Most likely the C drive will be your boot partition and E will be your windows partition.
Prior to this I found that I do have a real C and E drive after using Rdeploy for imaging so I could then use DISM to inject drivers. However, there might be other needs to run scripts from PE prior to imaging and perhaps other needs like...
This year, our Windows 7 image is massive as it contains the full Adobe suite. At 30GB, rdeploy takes nearly 4 hours to multicast a lab of 15 computers. I really hope GSS 3.0 will be site server aware and use ghostcast server to eliminate the need for peer multicast and double our speed. I'm planning on that not happening and would like to use wim imaging to image the C drive from a recovery image in c:\recovery. In order to do that, I need to be able to see the real C drive with the recovery image.
Using PXE boot is a possibility as that shows the real C drive as well, but it doesn't work well enough in our environment. I'll post below with a follow up article about how to pre-stage a recovery image to machines you'd like to image in the future. That way I can reimage 200+ computers at the same time without worrying about bandwidth or one machine failing which screws up rdeploy.
Microsoft has been pushing the idea that you sould be refreshing Windows from a local image rather than imaging. I have not liked that idea as they won't release an updated ISO file with all the latest Windows updates and I don't have 3 hours to wait for updates to install after a scripted installation. This way, I can keep a current image on all my computer by sending updates WIM files in off hours. That way, if a machine goes down, it can be brought back online quicker without relying on the network. In this case, I have a bootable flash drive with local scripts that work outside of GSS/Altiris. We've got 16,000 computers to reimaging during this summer as we are a school district. I'd love to have all my machines able to reimage in the first week rather than having to do 15 at a time and schedule network resources.