Fireside

Well we kind of do what your wanting to do but not quite. We put XP Embedded images on our devices through winpe 2.0 but we don't use the vista set up. We use our own setup program that i wrote in VB6 and it formats with disk part and apply's the wim file the the local drive and boots in the the First Boot Agent of Embedded with no problem. You could guess you could do the samething with a syspreped XP image. Today i will try installing an XP Pro and sysprep it and use our setup program to see if it matters what version of XP it is. If you know VB6 its not hard to do. My program is only 88Kb and it generates a diskpart script of options you choose and then uses that smartwim.dll to apply the image to the drive. Theres no Fancy graphics in it or anything but it works like a charm.

Yeah we use ISO's on udrw usb keys so we can't exactly eject them. I remove the "boot from cd..." option thing too because we want it to boot the cd everytime except after the final process then we want it to reboot in to the OS we install on devices... its currently set up to need no user interaction except to remove the usb key before the final reboot but i'm trying to make it easier for out customers so it requires no interaction... I had an image that did almost what i wanted... It'd boot to the cd once then ignore it on boot until it was removed and reinserted but i want it to boot the cd multiple times then whne it done set that... but i don't know how i got that one cd to do that... apparently i did it on accident and i can't seem to duplicate it.

I've seen some cds be able to do this and i was wondering if anyone knows how to make a cd tell the bios to ignore it on reboot. The cds i'm refering to seem to be able to tell the bios that on reboot don't even try to boot to me so when the machine reboots it blows right past the cd and straight to the hard drive. And i don't mean that "Press any key to boot to cd..." thing.

Is there a way to change the screen resolution that is used at the "windows is loading files" part of the boot sequence? The monitors we use this on doesn't support 1024x768 but support 800x600. Once it loads into the shell it uses 800x600 so thats not the issue just at the one loading screen it sits on for like 3 minutes. Don't want our customers to stare at a "out of sync" error on their screen for like 3 minutes during system updates. Update: Well I've got it working. If anyones curious on how to do it or needs to do it just delete the \boot\fonts\wgl4_boot.ttf font file and it'll use a lower screen resolution for the entire boot process.