I just installed UBCD4 Windows 2.55 along with the drivers using Bart PE 313 and created a bootable CD with all the plugins. I cannot see my normal C:\ data however after booting. I only get the A: floppy, D: CD, Ramdisk and X: for the "system" files.

I have a Dell 8400 with a 160 gig serial ATA hard drive running Windows XP Home Edition with SP2. The C:\ disk has the NTFS format but I know Dell has hidden a small FAT partition and a small FAT32 partition.

This is probably a dumb error on my part as I am new UBCD4 user. My XP device manager indicates the drivers for disk are DISK.SYS and PARTMGR.SYS and for controllers (I have no idea if this is even pertinent) the Primary IDE indicates ATAPI.SYS and STORPROP.DLL and the SATA controller indicates IASTOR.SYS. There was also a Ultra ATA controller indicating PCIIDE.SYS. Except for the DLL file, these are all listed as drivers in the booted UBCD4 environment.

Any suggestions on what to try next would be appreciated.

The only part of your post that bothers me slightly, is that you were very specific about everything (mentioning version numbers etc.) except when you say, "along with the drivers." I just want to be sure: did you download and install the NIC and Mass Storage Driver pack named ubcd4winDriversV16.exe? Your problem looks like a typical "doesn't have the SATA drivers installed" issue. You can check HERE to see if your controller is supported. If your controller is supported, likely one of 2 possibilities exist: 1) The drivers are not installed or 2) the drivers are installed incorrectly. Your UBCD4Win directory ought to look similar to the following examples: (click on a thumbnail to view a larger image)



This should serve as a starting point to hunt down the problem.

DW

Digi!!! HEY!!! How are ya? Anyways, back on the topic subject, you can also check out my latest post, if you wanted to try something a little different when it comes to a huge amount of drivers... LOOK HERE.

[quote=DigiWiz,Oct 10 2005, 11:05 PM]

I did indeed download and install the drivers you noted. Thank you for the link to the supported controllers. My INTEL 8201FR SATA AHCI is there. My directory entries don't quite look like yours as I have "pebuilder313" as my top level since I didn't need to unload a zipped file of UBCD4Windows by virtue of having a CD mailed to me. (I would include a "picture" of my directory listing as you did - nice touch - if I knew how! ) I don't think that matters. After installing the drivers, the subdirectory entries looked like yours and indeed were populated with the UBCD4 drivers. After running UBCD4 I verified that the plugin subdirectory was also populated. My h/w device manager shows the driver for the controller noted above is IASTOR.SYS and that was in the drivers/SCSIAdaptor/ subdirecdtory.

I built a bootable disk to no avail - still can't see C:\. I noticed that the IASTOR.SYS driver on my XP system had a different size than the one included with UBCD4. I tried my own XP driver and created another bootable disk - same non-result. In both cases I could see that the IASTOR.SYS drivers with the appropriate sizes were in the UBCD4 booted environment. Obviously, I am missing something. Thank you so much for your help.

(By the way, I happened to have a plain old Bart PE boot disk in my CD under my normal XP system and it started to the point of giving me "GO" start button. Clicking it, I could run a Bart PE utility that could see my total environment. Wish I knew what that is seeing that the booted environment can't see.)

Success! I am pleased to report that I can now see my C:\ data after booting from the UBCD. I gave up troubleshooting, scanning forums, etc. I just deleted everything, reinstalled, re-executed and everything worked. I did everything the same except for one thing: I replied "Yes" to automatically replace all duplicates in the the PE Builder directory with the UBCD files. Previously I responded to the individual prompts (I wanted to see what and how many files were being replaced) and I can only conclude that I messed up on one of the prompts which caused my problem.

I particularly want to thank "DigiWiz" for the detailed reply which gave me a much better understanding of what was going on and made me challenge myself.

That's strange. The UBCD4Win download and the drivers download both are set to overwrite everything automatically without user intervention. I've never had to say yes to overwrite anything since like version 2.0... very strange, but at least you got it working.

It's actually quite easy to duplicate - I rarely allow something to automatically overwrite anything unless I'm absolutely certain I can lose the previous data (of course, a backup is the easy way, but I generally distrust apps which overwrite without asking).

The following method assumes you have WinRAR installed on your machine.

To extract without automatically overwriting, simply right-click on the desired SFX file, and select as shown in the below example:
(click on thumbnail for larger image)



If the files already exist, you will be asked in the usual fashion if you want to overwrite.

DW

That's kind of silly though. I mean, if you start with a brand new folder and extract pebuilder to that folder, and then extract the UBCD4Win download to that folder, you WANT to overwrite everything and you KNOW you wont lose anything as it's only extracting to that one folder that was just created! And as I said, the options set in the SFX archive force it to automatically overwrite everything without warning... or at least it should, as we used to have users always complaining about this and asking what to do, or getting errors during building. I've never seen it ask on any system I've tried, whether they have WinRAR or not.

Hi guys - thanks for your comments. Just as a point of clarification, here's what I did:

1. Downloaded PE builder and extracted it into a new folder.

2. Made an extra copy of the PE folder.

3. Renamed the plugin sub-directory in the original PE builder folder.

4. Ran the UBCD4Windows CD that was mailed to me using the options to apply the plugins and the drivers AND overwrite some of PE builder files with prompts. (So there was no second "extraction" from a downloaded file overwriting the first extraction i.e. the PE builder files.)