Sdidisk to occupy entire drive.

[Mark]

Hey Everyone-

I build my XPE image to an sdi disk then startup the target machine with a
dosboot cdrom with the sdi image and sdi2hd extractor on the cd. I was
wondering since we use 2gb CF drives, and the cdrom is my only method of
distibution, I was wondering if there was a way to merge the remaining space
on a single partition since the cd only has about 650mb of free space? Or do
I have to just computer management to format and use it as a seperate
partition?

Thanks

[KM]

Mark,

Currently MS SDI imaging solution does not allow to compact SDI files.

I think Slobodan has mentioned a trick about trimming the SDI file. But you will have to do a custom boot loader to load that
trimmed SDI file properly in RAM.
Here we go: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&selm=OpkgGJ0dEHA.2520%40TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl

This article will help you to start with the loader code: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnxpesp1/html/ram_sdi.asp

--
Regards,
KM, BSquare Corp.

[Slobodan Brcin (eMVP)]

Hi Konstantin,

Actually he wants to use sdi2hd to deploy image to CF, not to do ram boot.
I have mentioned somewhere how to compact files on disk, and how to trim SDI file and size.

So you will deploy only first part of disk that contain actual data. Everything else on disk will be untouched when deploying data
from SDI to disk. But since FS and files are the only thing that is relevant, just in unitialized part of disk will be treated as
free sectors.

One benefit from this is that your deploy procedure will be much faster, since you will need to copy only used data and not whole
disk size.

Regards,
Slobodan

"KM" <konstmor@nospam_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:OJ916lOz...@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...

[Mark]

Exactly Slobodan,
But if I trim the sdi disk to just the size of the files then the rest of
the disk is uninitialized.....

What if for example, I must install one of our custom applications on the C:
Drive,
Image ~300mb
Then the max amount of space I have left on the primary partition is approx
300-400 what if I want to occupy the remaining portion of the 2gb flash
drive? Is there a resizer or a way to make the C: expand to the remain size
or must I use computer management to make it a secondary partition? D:?

[Slobodan Brcin (eMVP)]

Hi Mark,

When I said disk I mean really disk. "DISK" BLOB.

Use or refine following procedure:
1. Grab DISK BLOB of 2GB from your master CF (post FBA image) to SDI file.
2. Mount SDI file on your dev machine. (I have no idea if 2GB can be mounted, in case that it can't there is another way so let us
know)
3. Compact all files on beginning of disk. With following procedure: (or some utility)
- Delete all files from mounted SDI disk.
- Dismount disk.
- Zero all bytes in this file starting from let us say 16MB offset to the end of file.
- Mount SDI file again.
- Copy all files from CF to mounted SDI disk with let say xcopy or some tools.
- Dismount SDI disk.
- Start reading SDI file from end in blocks of 4KB until you find data.
- Trim SDI file so all non-zero data remain in file.
- In first few KB of SDI file find DWORD that tell about the SDI file size and DISK blob size and modify them to contain correct
values.

This smaller SDI file you can deploy to your disk and you will see full disk size.

Regards,
Slobodan

"Mark" <Ma...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:D4633D13-F245-49AA...@microsoft.com...