Diskpart problems xw4600

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Diskpart problems xw4600 - 6/3/2008 9:49:05 AM

ahansen29

Posts: 10
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Joined: 3/7/2006
From: Denmark
Status: offline

Have a weird problem here, have several HP Workstation xw4600, which are being deployed via OSD in SMS 2003.
The machine vary a bit, but all have the same configuration, all WMI i can pull out of it, says that the systems are identical.
But during boot from WinPE 2.0, some of the machines detects primary disk as Disk 4, not Disk 0, rest of the machines detect
Disk 0.
After bootup and in XP if i do a diskpart, all disks shows up as Disk 0.

So during deploymet i dont know how to distinquish between the models that will show up as Primary Disk 4, and the ones that will show
up as Primary disk 0. Since all WMI i can query on is identical.
And that means diskpart will fail. Anyone has a suggestion for how to detect which disk is the primary before i try to diskpart the machine.

_____________________________

Regards

Anders Hansen
Denmark

Post #: 1

RE: Diskpart problems xw4600 - 6/9/2008 11:17:25 PM

rbennett806

Posts: 732
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Joined: 6/14/2006
Status: offline

So on the machines that detect the primary disk as disk 4, what's it showing as disk 0? If nothing else, boot from a generic WinPE disk on the machines showing disk 4 as the primary and see what's going on.

I'm a little confused when you say the machines vary a bit, but have the same configuration. How can they be different, but the same? Sounds like there's a difference somewhere. Maybe they need a BIOS update?

(in reply to ahansen29)

Post #: 2

RE: Diskpart problems xw4600 - 6/23/2008 3:16:14 PM

mrucker64

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Joined: 6/18/2008
Status: offline

I'll bet the "varying" has to do with optical devices and such? Where I work we like to think that the HDD will always be disk 0 and the dvd will always be disk 1, etc.. But what we find is when we have two optical devices (A dvd burner then plain jane CD/DVD device), that occasionally one of those devices gets in the way and all the sudden the HDD is disk 1. What I'd suggest is crack the case open and see what the cable situation looks like.

(in reply to rbennett806)

Post #: 3

RE: Diskpart problems xw4600 - 6/23/2008 3:57:59 PM

mrucker64

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Joined: 6/18/2008
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I took this a bit further and looked at an old script I was working on that was foiled by this very problem. Frankly I haven't gotten back to it, but I'll show you the beginning.

@echo off
echo * Diskpart now configuring the local HDD.  Sure hope you didn't want anything off of it =)
echo ---
echo select disk 0 > %temp%\dp.txt
echo clean >> %temp%\dp.txt
echo create partition primary >> %temp%\dp.txt
diskpart /s %temp%\dp.txt
if NOT %errorlevel% == 0 goto _error_creating_partition

echo select disk 0 > %temp%\dp.txt

The idea is that when I'm ready, I just:

diskpart /s %temp%\dp.txt

which runs diskpart with an autocreated script called "dp.txt". The next step, which I'll post if I get around to it ^_^, is to perhaps use diskpart with a one line script of "list disk" and using either Windows PE's find.exe or perhaps awk (which means I need to add it to the PE disk, etc...) to find an active hard drive, and its disk number.

Certainly one way in which this can fail is if you have multiple hard drives in the system, but optical devices seem to show up differently. On XP here I have two hard drives and two optical, and the command:

diskpart /s listdisk.txt | find /i "Online"

begets:
Disk 0 Online 74 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 75 GB 0 B

which doesn't show me the optical. Note that in the original problem description you mentioned using WinPE 2.0, which is Vista, no? =) Likely there is a difference in the two versions of Diskpart.

-mr

(in reply to mrucker64)

Post #: 4

RE: Diskpart problems xw4600 - 6/23/2008 4:14:25 PM

ahansen29

Posts: 10
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Joined: 3/7/2006
From: Denmark
Status: offline

Thank you all for the input, problem was confirmed from HP. And the models with identical bios reported the primary disk as different Index 0 or 4 :). Final solution to the problem was pretty close to the one mrucker64 :)

Wrote a litte WMI to query for the disk. and used it as input for diskpart.

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colDiskPartitions = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_DiskPartition")
For each objPartition in colDiskPartitions
iDiskIndex=objPartition.DiskIndex
Next

Only one disk in all the machines :) and detecting it before anyway, but thank you for constructive input.

_____________________________

Regards

Anders Hansen
Denmark

(in reply to mrucker64)

Post #: 5

RE: Diskpart problems xw4600 - 8/20/2008 5:23:57 AM

marimar

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Joined: 1/23/2008
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Hi Anders!

A customer of mine experience the exact same problem with that machine. They have the same SMS/OSD environment as you have, deploying OS with Zerotouch.

I wanted to ask you how you solved it using your wmi-script?
Did you incorporate the script in ztidiskpart.wsf or did you use some other solution.

If you can help I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks /Paul

(in reply to ahansen29)

Post #: 6

RE: Diskpart problems xw4600 - 8/21/2008 5:23:59 AM

marimar

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Joined: 1/23/2008
Status: offline

I have tried to incorporate your wmi-piece in the ZTIDiskpart.wsf and then exchanging all the “if iDiskIndex = 0” conditions to “ifiDiskIndex = wmiDiskIndex” (I stored the true DiskIndex in wmiDiskIndex in the script).

That works fine, except a cosmetic error where winpe can’t store the Tasksequence log and the other BDD logs when diskpart cleans the partition. The install still continues though.

I wonder why that is, since it doesn’t get the error when the iDiskIndex is 0 instead of 4 in this case.

BTW, if I disconnect the memorycard readers from the motherboard, the disk gets index 0 as usual.

(in reply to ahansen29)

Post #: 7

RE: Diskpart problems xw4600 - 8/25/2008 7:26:55 AM

eschloss

Posts: 599
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Joined: 9/7/2004
From: Cincinnati
Status: offline

I have seen this issue with other HP systems when crtain USB devices are plugged in during the OSD process. The one that has gotten us multiple times are zip disks. I don't even know why they're still around.

(in reply to marimar)

Post #: 8