I think part of what may be happening here is that you're essentially going
through a "System Cloning" scenario (even though it's technically not using
the System Cloning Tool), and it's possible that differences in each hard
drive's partition structure may be confusing EWF's configuration. Note that
to properly support having a single runtime being copied to multiple
devices, you should use the System Cloning Tool (fbreseal.exe) to "reseal"
the post-FBA image so that it can properly reinitialize itself on the new
target device. This may or may not help with EWF specifically, but it
sounds like there's a little too much room for variation in your scenario
for me to pin down an exact cause.

As a troubleshooting step, please try rebuilding your image with the System
Cloning Tool component included, set it up however works best for your
scenario, then perform your "burn to CD and redeploy" step immediately after
you reseal the image. Again, I cannot guarantee this will fix the problem,
but it will at least help me rule out a couple of possible causes.

It occurs to me that you mentioned this is on a SATA-based system. What
does the IDE chain look like in each target device? Is it exactly the same,
and do the systems have the same BIOS? If not, it's possible that the BIOS
on the system is causing the drives and individual partitions to enumerate
differently on each device, which can cause EWF to no longer be linked to
the correct hard drive partition. We have had a couple of earlier reports
of El Torito and USB Boot scenarios not working correctly on systems using
SATA hard drives because of enumeration problems, and they've had some
interesting and tricky workarounds.

As a proof-of-concept, do you have a set of two or more target devices
(don't have to be the same hardware) that have IDE-only hardware (no SATA)?
If so, here's something you could try to see if this is a problem with your
SATA-based devices, a problem somewhere in your procedure, or a bug in one
of our components:

* Create a new runtime with the following components:
* Winlogon Sample Macro
* Enhanced Write Filter (configure for RAM Reg mode)
* EWF Manager
* CMD - Command-Line Processor

* Resolve dependencies and build the runtime.
* Configure both devices the same way, with two partitions similar to your
SATA setup.
* Deploy the runtime to the first device and configure as appropriate.
* Repeat your recovery CD procedure and copy the runtime to the second
device.
* See if you continue to have problems with the FP2007 version of EWF.

My guess is that, based on what we've seen before, this procedure will work
correctly, but granted it's a more generalized runtime (Winlogon Sample
Macro should run on just about anything) and with a more limited set of
hardware. But to my knowledge, there weren't any changes to EWF itself that
should cause it to work any differently than the SP2 version in the scenario
you described, assuming both versions are configured the same way.

If you have the ability to test this out, please let me know how it works
for you. If you still have problems with it at that point, I'll forward it
to our product team. Thanks.

--
Matt Kellner
SDET, Microsoft Windows Embedded Team

This message is posted AS-IS, without any warranty, and confers no rights.


"Mike Warren" <miwa-not-this-bit@or-this-csas.net.au> wrote in message
news:xn0frcfwcdto9z001@news.microsoft.com...
> Mike Warren wrote:
>
>> Tomorrow, I'll get a brand new disk, create exactly the same partition
>> setup as the disks that don't work, and build my image from scratch.
>
> This problem has nothing to do with FBWF.
>
> After going around in circles for several hours I removed FBWF and
> rebuilt the image.
>
> Here is my procedure and results:
>
> 1/ Copy pre-FBA image to a hard drive connected to my system by a
> USB-SATA adaptor.
>
> 2/ Connect the drive to a target machine via SATA and run FBA.
>
> 3/ Reconnect to my dev machine and copy all the files except System
> Volume Information folder to a compressed recovery file with my custom
> recovery program.
>
> 4/ Burn this recovery file on a boot CD along with my recovery program.
>
> 5/ Reconnect the hard drive to the target machine.
>
> 6/ Boot the recovery CD, which formats C: and then extracts all files
> from the recovery image.
>
> At this point EWF works fine.
>
> 7/ Connect a new hard drive to the target device and perform a recovery
> from the boot CD again.
>
> EWF fails here.
>
> 8/ Try an existing target device that is known to work with my older
> XPe builds and the same recovery procedure.
>
> EWF fails again.
>
> 9/ Recover my old SP2 (pre FP2007) based build to this same machine.
>
> EWF works fine.
>
>
> So... What has changed since SP2 that may cause this behaviour?
>
> This is more serious than I originally thought because I can't
> currently release a build with EWF at all.
>
> --
> - Mike