Copy folder Post Deployment

[Chris Jones]

Good morning,

For quite some time now we've been successfully deploying an image using SmartDeploy, and in the answer file having it copy over a folder from the USB media to the C:\ drive as a post deployment task. First login then executes various installers and a configuration script. We don't want to bake these in as they're somewhat fluid, and we like being able to tweak, add, remove without fussing with the image.

Recently though we've had system from Dell where copying this folder simply doesn't work. On investigation, the SmartPE environment doesn't seem to see a logical drive for Physical Disk 0. The whole imaging process will still works, but as my post deployment task copies from the deployment media (using the %SmartDeploy_Media% variable) to C:\, that just doesn't happen.

Is there a similar variable I could use to reference the destination drive?

Another oddity, if the system did image once, the next time we try to image SmartPE does see Physical Drive 0 as C:\ and everything works as expected.

Also open to suggestions on an alternative way to achieve this without baking the files into the image. I had hoped to leverage application packs, but that seems to require using a SmartDeploy server setup (which we do not use).

[SmartDeploySupport]

Hi Chris,

This is pretty common behavior in WindowsPE - the drive letters can be a bit unusual while Windows is getting installed due to the variable order in which system devices can initialize, and this can vary by computer model, so it's equally unsurprising that C:\ has worked on some models but not on this one. 

Luckily, it's an issue we have to deal with at deployment time as well, so we create two drive letters specifically for our use in the PE environment, and you're welcome to reference them in Tasks or scripts in PE for your purposes as well. 

T:\ refers to the primary OS partition on Disk 0, which will eventually (after reboot) become C:\. 
S:\ refers to the system reserve partition, which you likely won't have to interact with in any way; just mentioning it here for reference. 

So replacing C:\ with T:\ in your existing task to copy from a location on %SmartDeploy_Media% should work just fine. 

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or issues - support@smartdeploy.com. 

Glenn
SmartDeploy Support

[Chris Jones]

Thank Glenn! Swapping the drive letter of to T:\ worked a charm.