Lasray

The infrastructure of sound, video, modems, wifi etc are indeed missing from windows PE. Devcon.exe from Microsoft is a command line tool that takes the place of Device Manager and works well within Windows PE. I have used it many times. Using the switch 'driverfiles' should help identify the drivers loaded per device. Eurosoft do have the ability to diagnose sound for WinPE 1.5 and 2.x but it is bundled up in their software package. Since I left the company I do not think they had anyone to continue this development and doubt they would be able to help if you were thinking of asking them.

Yes Windows PE can be booted from a hard drive. In your WAIK (OPK) documentation there is a section under 'Customizing Windows PE' named 'Walkthrough: Boot Windows PE from a hard disk'. I think this is the information that you require.

Sorry I meant to say add the tstsetup.sif file on the root of the image on the PXE server, not the CD

Using bcdedit.exe -store there are 2 options that may help debug the bootup of the image. The options to set are 'sos' and 'bootlog' (I cannot remember the exact syntax of the whole command as I write this) but its something like bcdedit.exe -store <drive>\boot\BCD -set GUID sos Yes bcdedit.exe -store <drive>\boot\BCD -set GUID bootlog Yes (The image will have to be mounted on your technical machine first, vdk.exe is 1 tool that will do this and will give you <drive> value) Once these options are set in the image and then booting the image *may* give an indication of where the error is or perhaps what is causing it. It should at least stop when the error occurs giving all the drivers loaded so far. I hope this helps

Try adding the txtsetup.sif file to the root as well and re-do the CD.

If you keep the WDS server in mixed mode you will have the ability to boot Linux or DOS *and* WinPE2 images using the same server. The WDS server will give you a menu when the client pxe boots of all the WinPE images available to download/boot into. On this same menu will be a submenu that will show the linux images in the same way that you are already familiar with. Under the heading 'Deploy Linux from Windows WDS/RIS server using PXELinux' from Syslinux will give you pointers on how to set up the Linux images. Changing the WDS server to native mode is non reversable back to mixed mode.

You have pulled the raw data into a string by the looks of thinks. Try using WMI which is available if the WMI package is installed into WinPE and to help here is a vb code snippet: strServer = "." Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts://" & strServer & "/root\WMI") Set objInstances = objWMI.InstancesOf("MSSmBios_RawSMBiosTables",48) On Error Resume Next For Each objInstance in objInstances With objInstance WScript.Echo .Active WScript.Echo .DmiRevision WScript.Echo .InstanceName WScript.Echo .Size WScript.Echo Join(.SMBiosData, ", ") WScript.Echo .SmbiosMajorVersion WScript.Echo .SmbiosMinorVersion WScript.Echo .Used20CallingMethod End With On Error Goto 0 Next I hope this helps

I have known situations where various NTFS formatted 8Mb thumb drive would not be 'seen' by a full Vista OS, unless you extracted and reinerted the thumb drive. Is this situation related to yours, I do not know? But since this quirk I have always formatted the thumb drives as FAT32. Why such a large drive for WinPE? If its for deployment/data could you not use a WDS server?

To add a regidtry entry to your mounted WIM file: Mount your WIM image Run regedit from your OS Highlight the HKLM key On the regedit menu select File|Load hive... Navigate to <your mounted WIM image>\Windows\System32\Config Select 'SYSTEM' :this is the HKLM\System hive for the mounted WIM. Select SOFTWARE if its the software hive you are after. Regedit will ask for a key name, type 'Temp' or any name you like. You know have a Temp hive in Regedit Amend any key you like in this Temp hive When finished select File|Unload hive... from the regedit menu. Thats it - your changes are now in the Wim registry. Dont forget to commit your changes to the mounted WIM for them to 'stick'

I had this problem too. Writing a little vbscript to look for and then stop the imagex process is one way of doing this. Its virtual the same as the task manager but you can run it from the command prompt.

I'm sure there is a way to use Windows RE boot sequence but with PE in the partition? Is it not possible to set up and use RE as normal, put the PE contents in the RE partition and change the winpeshl.ini contents to pick up PE instead of RE? Other than that the links that jaclaz supplied would be the way to go

Try putting the other VC8 .dll and manifests in the same folder as the utility you are trying to run

Is this the link that some of you have been looking for? Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows 7 Beta)

To zeusabj: Yes, if you copy those drivers and place them into c:\drivers for example, then use the command peimg.exe /inf=c:\drivers\inf_name.inf <your mounted image>\Windows In the WAIK manual there is a section "Walkthrough: Create a Custom Windows PE Image" that may be useful to you! Any jobs going there?

Excuse me for asking but I would request clarification. Yes I have read the forum rules but I want to be absolutley sure. Is it permissable to announce our own software? Thanks Ray