How to check the integrity of an image

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• Deployment Solution

Issue/Introduction

 

Resolution

Question
When you try and open either an .IMG or .EXE Rdeploy image file via Image Explorer, it fails to open and states that it is a corrupt file.  How can a check be automated, so that less time is required for large image stores?

Answer

If the image files were Ghost images, you could utilize the Ghost32.exe command line option that checks the integrity of the image:

“.\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\Ghost\Ghost32.exe” –CHKIMG,<path\image file>

Unfortunately Rdeploy.exe does not have such a switch and nor does imgexpl.exe. However, you may wish to try the following to open an image file and then look for some of the imgexpl.exe process exit codes that are listed in the “.\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\ImgExpl_EN.chm” help file under the Command Lines section:

imgexpl.exe <path\image name>

You will need to run a kill imgexpl.exe process command afterwards in order to close Image Explorer.

You can also perform this test via WinPe from the “.\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\RDeploy\Windows\” directory.

You maybe able to create a script that runs Image Explorer against an image file which looks for imgexpl.exe processes return codes, and then kills this process if still running. (I don’t know if Image Explorer still opens if it cannot open an image file or not.)  The script could also be configured to create a NSI file containing the test results which could be placed into the “.\Altiris\eXpress\Inventory\” directory so that the AeXNSInvCollector.exe can create a NSE file and send it to the NS for data processing into a Custom Inventory table.

Other possibilities could be a Sequential SWD Task or even a Task Server Job, as both could utilize the imgexpl.exe process return codes as well.