Monday 18 June 2012

Service Advisor ISO Mount

This code comes with absolutely no warranty.  We've been having issues especially on Windows 7 where Service Advisor loses it's connection to the ISOs over the network and does not bring them up unless we go through and edit all the disks.

To solve that problem we no longer use the capability of SA to mount ISOs.  Instead we're using a program called ImDisk.  http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk

Once that application is installed I have the following batch file placed on the desktop and linked to the "Startup" folder so that it runs each time the computer is started.  I leave the original on the desktop so that the tech can easily run it himself if he is unable to access the disks.  So far this has worked very well over the last few months.  The "sadata_drive" variable needs to point to your shared network connection as shown in the example.  It also needs to be enclosed in quotation marks but this forum seems to be stripping the quotation marks for me.  Once the application is run you just point service advisor to c:\sadata\AG_01 and so on.  You can also save the following code to a .reg file and just import the folders into the registry.  Thanks to Benjamin Bergen of GVE for share the location of the additional data paths with me.

Batch File:
rem @echo off
set sadata_drive="\\server01\sadata_train"
mkdir c:\sadata\
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_01
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_02
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_03
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_04
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_05
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_06
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_07
mkdir c:\sadata\AG_08
mkdir c:\sadata\CCE_01
mkdir c:\sadata\CCE_02
mkdir c:\sadata\CCE_03
mkdir c:\sadata\CCE_04
mkdir c:\sadata\AGHIST_01
mkdir c:\sadata\AGHIST_02
mkdir c:\sadata\AGHIST_03
mkdir c:\sadata\AGHIST_04

imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_01.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_01\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_02.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_02\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_03.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_03\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_04.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_04\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_05.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_05\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_06.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_06\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_07.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_07\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AG_08.iso -m c:\sadata\AG_08\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AGHIST_01.iso -m c:\sadata\AGHIST_01\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AGHIST_02.iso -m c:\sadata\AGHIST_02\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AGHIST_03.iso -m c:\sadata\AGHIST_03\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\AGHIST_04.iso -m c:\sadata\AGHIST_04\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\CCE_01.iso -m c:\sadata\CCE_01\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\CCE_02.iso -m c:\sadata\CCE_02\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\CCE_03.iso -m c:\sadata\CCE_03\
imdisk -a -f %sadata_drive%\CCE_04.iso -m c:\sadata\CCE_04\

Registry File:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ServiceADVISOR\DataPaths\AdditionalDataPaths]
"AltPath1"="D:\\"
"AltPath2"="C:\\sadata\\AG_01\\"
"AltPath3"="C:\\sadata\\AG_02\\"
"AltPath4"="C:\\sadata\\AG_03\\"
"AltPath5"="C:\\sadata\\AG_04\\"
"AltPath6"="C:\\sadata\\AG_05\\"
"AltPath7"="C:\\sadata\\AG_06\\"
"AltPath8"="C:\\sadata\\AG_07\\"
"AltPath9"="C:\\sadata\\AG_08\\"
"AltPath10"="C:\\sadata\\AGHIST_01\\"
"AltPath11"="C:\\sadata\\AGHIST_02\\"
"AltPath12"="C:\\sadata\\AGHIST_03\\"
"AltPath13"="C:\\sadata\\AGHIST_04\\"
"AltPath14"="C:\\sadata\\CCE_01\\"
"AltPath15"="C:\\sadata\\CCE_02\\"
"AltPath16"="C:\\sadata\\CCE_03\\"
"AltPath17"="C:\\sadata\\CCE_04\\"