CC3 boot disk on USB drive?

[reggiep]

Hi All,
It's my first half term in A CC3 school and I want to rebuild many, many machines so I want to speed up the process by making some of my spare USB memory sticks into build disks.

however they always seem to crash out looking for the A: drive at some point or other.

Is it possible to make a build disk with a standard USB mem stick that hasn't been bought with an A: drive on it?

Cheers

[SYNACK]

This thread should help:
creat bootable usb ghost drive

[reggiep]

Thanks, but that's not what I want!

I used to do that when I used ghost at my last school BUT CC3 won't work like that as it seems to want the USB drive to be drive a:

I was wondering if anyone had managed to bypass this limitation at any other CC3 school?

Cheers

[SYNACK]

You just create a system disk formated partition on the USB key with the hp USB key tool, use you existing CC3 disk as the source for the boot files then copy the rest of the files off the gloppy onto the USB key.

When booted from this should show up as a: depending on your system bios. If a: is 100% critical then you could simply burn an image of the CC3 disk onto a CD and as it emulates a FDD it will show up as a. That is if you have CD drives.

[Michael]

Use a bootable CD method, it'll work with any machine this way. Most machines still don't support booting off a USB device.

[reggiep]

Nope, The bootable CD won't work either as during the CC3 build data is sent back to the floppy!

It is frustrating as I have one usb drive that has floppy drive emulation and about 20 that don't!

[cookie_monster]

RM don't still insist on floppy drives so they??? Good greif

[reggiep]

Oh yes they do!

I'm making a list of all my frustrations in my little black book. When It comes time to upgrade the system next year I'll look at it before I decide to upgrade to CC4!

[Jona]

I assume you've seen: How to create and use a bootable USB memory stick as a floppy drive replacement ? (beware window resizing if you click the link)

I guess "A bootable USB memory stick that can emulate a USB-ZIP or USB-FDD device." Is the crucial line.

[reggiep]

@Jona

I have seen it, but thanks for looking!

I'm still playing with the config files at the moment.

[TheScarfedOne]

When I was looking at moving away from CC3 last year, I wrote a set of scripts to format disk, and build XP based on a series of unattend files, then run the CC3 smart client routine - running from USB. This worked well - but it depends whether you want the restore option. As this isnt strictly a CC3 build disk - the restore partition stuff is never completed. I will see if I can dig out the files for you if interested. PM me if you want more info.

[kmount]

Its not that difficult to make a usb bootable one (we're using 5 at the moment rebuilding a room). - We're using "Floppy Imager".

Make sure your disks have "Boot Manager" so in future you can rebuild them locally without the need for a disk.

[reggiep]

Did you move away from CC3 in the end?

[sparkeh]

Its dead easy to make a CC3 USB boot disk.

Using one at this very moment. If your stick is formatted as USB-ZIP then just drag the CC3 build files over. Job done.

[webman]

I use the HP tool for our USB drives - works fine.

To make the whole process quicker I use Virtual Floppy Disk to emulate a floppy drive - also handy to write different build disks to different images. I found the HP tool won't read VFD images properly but if you mount the image in VFD you just select A: as the source in the HP tool.

The only gotcha is that the RM build disk creator will only write to A:, so if using VFD you will need to disable/change the letter of your physical floppy drive.