The functionality of Storage Area Network (SAN) enables a server to mount disks and other storage devices automatically from other computers.

By configuring the SAN policy on a Windows® image, you can control whether or not disks are automatically mounted, which disks can be mounted, and you can disable automatically mounting disks.

Configure the SAN policy on Windows PE

For Windows PE images that are available in the Windows OPK and the Windows AIK, the default SAN policy is to mount available disks automatically. This might reduce the performance of Windows PE if there are many available disks in the SAN environment.

You can use the setsanpolicy.cmd file in the Windows PE tools path to configure the default SAN policies on a Windows PE image.

  1. Mount the Windows PE image to an available mount point. For example,

    imagex /mountrw C:\winpe_x86\ISO\sources\boot.wim 1 C:\winpe_x86\mount
  2. Run the setsanpolicy command. For example,

    setsanpolicy.cmd <image path> <Policy number>
    where <image path> is the path to a mounted Windows PE image and <policy number> is the SAN policy number. You can use the following values for <policy number>.

    SAN policy number Description

    1

    Mounts all available storage devices.

    This is the default value.

    2

    Mounts all storage devices except those on a shared bus.

    3

    Does not mount storage devices.
    For example, you can configure the SAN policy on a Windows PE image to mount all disks except those disks on a shared bus. For example,

    setsanpolicy C:\winpe_x86\mount 2
  3. Unmount the image and commit the changes. For example,

    imagex /unmount C:\winpe_x86\mount /commit

Configure the SAN policy on a Windows Image During Unattended Installation

You can change the default SAN policy of a Windows image by using the Microsoft-Windows-PartitionManager component. The SanPolicy setting is used to configure the Windows image during installation.

For more information, see the Unattended Windows Setup Reference.

See Also