GUI/General tools for Windows deployment
A collection of small but useful Windows utilities, mostly written to facilitate my unattended Windows XP installation package - in particular, GCopy copies the collection of applications from the network for later installation, complete with progress indicator; GDelete then deletes that temporary directory the same way.
Movedrive and Hidedrive are used to change or remove drive letter allocations as part of a scripted installation. While the Disk Administrator allows you to perform this change manually on a single machine, the command line diskpart tool doesn't work in this capacity - changes are reversed when you reboot. Making the change manually through the GUI works - but the results are not duplicated even when you perform a sector-by-sector copy of the entire partition, since Windows generates a unique identifier for each partition: even when cloned, since the identifiers don't match, the settings are recreated. In one University lab, we have three partitions: two with a copy of Windows XP on (dual-booting), the third as a common workspace for users. By default, Windows XP mounts these as C, D and E; we use hidedrive to suppress D (the other Windows installation), and movedrive to put the workspace on D instead. Oddly, diskpart is able to move the CD drive to J persistently.
License
Free of charge for unmodified non-commercial use; please contact me for anything else including custom versions, redistribution permission or commercial use.
Usage
Download the bundle from here. Unpack it into a directory, preferably one on your path (such as %SYSTEMROOT%\System32).
Syntax
gdelete <Title> [<Path 1> [<Path 2> ...]]
| Title | Required | This text will be shown in the progress indicator window to indicate which task is currently being performed. |
| Path 1..n | Optional | Each of the paths listed here will be deleted. If a pathname includes a space, it should be enclosed in double-quotes "like this". |
gcopy <Title> [<Path 1> [<Path 2> ...]] <Destination>
| Title | Required | This text will be shown in the progress indicator window to indicate which task is currently being performed. |
| Path 1..n | Optional | Each of the paths listed here will be copied. If a pathname includes a space, it should be enclosed in double-quotes "like this". |
| Destination | Required | This path identifies where the specified objects should be copied to. As with source objects, if the path includes a space it should be enclosed in double-quotes "like this". |
hidedrive <DriveLetter>
| DriveLetter | Required | The partition this drive letter identifies will no longer be made available after the next reboot. |
movedrive <Current Letter> <New Letter>
| Current Letter | Required | The drive letter as which the partition is currently mounted. |
| New Letter | Required | The letter the specified partition should have after the next reboot. |