Diskpart not working in WinPE

[Joseph Sheehan]

I'm hoping that someone can help me with this issue that I'm seeing. I'm booting off a USB key to WinPE and subsequently trying to partition a newly created array on a DL380G4 using Diskpart. The command does not work - comes back with

"disk management services could not complete the operation"

Dmadmin and DMServer services are both started so that isn't it. Can anyone tell me the version of Diskpart I should be using or, if this is a known problemm how can I circumvent this? I've seen a number of entries on the Internet related to BartPE which report this issue but there is a lot of opinion about what fixes it - nothing I've tried so far does it. Thanks.

[Todd Schelin]

Diskpart should work fine in WinPE on a DL380G4. What is most likely causing your issue is not having the Smart 6i Array controller driver installed and working in WinPE. By default PE does not have this driver embedded in the OS. You need to add the 6i driver and once it is there you should be fine.

[Joseph Sheehan]

Thanks for the reply but I don't think this is the issue. The driver for 6i was already in the System32 folder and I had successfully created an array using the SSTK. In any case I am having the same trouble on a Dell PC.

There is a lot of chatter about this using BartPE but I do not understand why this is failing on WinPE.

Perhaps there is an alternative? I have tried several versions of Diskpart - all of them fail.

Could the problem be something to do with the USB key?

[Joseph Sheehan]

For sake of completeness and realizing that there has not been much input on this problem - I have an update on this issue which I think is relevant.

I booted off the WinPE CD (tried both 1.2 and WINPE 2005) and the DISKPART utility worked without any problem. When I booted off the USB key the DISKPART utility failed. So,the problem is definitely Diskpart running from a system booted with a USB key (Flash) drive.

So, considering there was not much input on this problem I decided to open a ticket with Microsoft. The upshot of this action was that they will not provide support on this platform when the USB key was formatted with the HP utility - which it was. In fact, they will only provide tech support with a USB key formatted with the FORMATUFD.EXE utility. We are not OEM vendors so this utility is not available to us.

I believe I have three possible courses of actions:
1) Recode around the issue somehow by using a CD to boot off
2) Wait for the Longhorn BETA (where I believe I will find the FormatUFD utility available)
3) Find some other partitioning utility.