Mapping internal hard drives under the eXpress share

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

When running Deployment Solution on a server that has multiple drives, the image store is often stored on a different drive than where the Ghost Solution Suite server is installed too. Many times, users will map an extra drive to the image store so that they can then put images into and pull images out of this share. Is there an easier way to do this that does not require mapping extra drives?

Environment

GSS 3.x

Resolution

The following will assume that the server has a C drive of 40 GB, a D drive of 30 GB, and an E drive of 500 GB. The Deployment Server is installed on the D drive as a default install (Program Files (x86)\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\). The image store is on the E drive.

There are two ways to go about setting up the image store. One is to set up the Deployment Server so that it sees it as another share and create a drive mapping to access the E drive so that there are two drive mappings in the automation partition or in the PXE boot image.

The other way is to create an alias for the E drive. Creating an Alias will not interfere with any mappings that have been created for the E drive. It is just another way the E drive is known.

Browse to the C:\Program files (x86)\Altiris\eXpress\deployment server\images folder or the location of where the default eXpress share is located. (Make sure that there are no files or directories under the Images directory.) Cut all files and folders out of this directory and paste to another. When you are finished then copy the folder back.

• This is done by right-clicking on My Computer > Manage > Disk Management. 
• Highlight the E drive, which is the location of your alternative image store.
• Right-click on the E drive and select Change Drive letters and paths.
• Click Add > Browse to C:\Program files (x86)\Altiris \express\Deployment Server\Images.
• It should automatically have the Mount  in the following empty NTFS folder selected.  If it does not, select it.
• When the Images directory is highlighted, the OK button will become active. Click OK.
• This will mount the E drive up under the eXpress share. The good thing about this is the E Drive will now inherit the rights and permissions that are integral to the express share and there will not be any need to map an extra drive in the Deployment Server. Mount Drive Icon is now located in the express share.
• Within the map drive portion of the image job, this is the correct path now: .\Images\Images\Windows\%COMPNAME%.img. It will save the image on the E drive, but it will show an entry on the default C drive (no space is taken.)

This will only work on Virtual Drives on the same box.