Richie Firestorm

Thanks for that info. I've managed to come to that conclusion myself (tested and working on a computer with 220mb RAM) I did the following: 1. Created a WinPE 2.0 CD (not RAMDisk version) 2. Booted client PC with the WinPE CD 3. Mapped to a network share that had my prebuilt (and pre-sysprepped) XP WIM file 4. Ran diskpart with the following: select disk 0 clean create partition primary active assign letter=c format fs=ntfs quick exit 5. imagex.exe /apply <mapped drive>\xp.wim 1 c: 6. once download completed, exited cmd prompt and PC rebooted into sysprep stage of XP installation This is probably the best I can manage, unless there is some way of PXE booting to a really tiny WinPE that provides networking, diskpart and the imagex tools

Ok, I've managed to build both a USB and CD WinPE 2 that installs fine on PCs >=512mb. However, I'm having the same problem with the <=256mb PCs. It dawned on me that the USB/CD WinPE is still loading the RAMDisk version, so I need to know how to create a "flat file" version. Anyone know how I can do this?

Is there any way to cut down a WinPE wim image that will load into RAM for calling an XP install from WDS? I've got it working on computers with over 384mb, but I have a large number of computers with 256mb (less with shared VGA) that networking fails to work on. This is a limitation with WinPE, so I was wondering if it was possible to chop out everything except the ability to boot from PXE then call the wim image from WDS I know I could buld a bootable USB drive to do this, but it would be better to just PXE boot WinPE which would then call the XP wim. Any ideas or is it just not possible?