getwired

See, to me and many other people here, BartPE is different than WinPE because it is seperate code. While they may try to parallel certain things that came before them, they do so using their own tools...in this case that's code. Aargh. How many times to I have to restate this. BartPE IS A BUILD TOOL.M. It uses 100% of the codepaths that WinPE does. If the WinPE team had not changed anything, BartPE would not exist. Bart reverse engineered Microsoft code, in Windows binaries, that was designed to work a specific way if Windows was running in MiniNT mode - in WinPE mode. This was code that was consciously changed to work a specific way to provide WinPE with specific functionality. When the Windows PE code changed in XPSP2 and Server SP1 so that the boot drive was always X:, "BartPE" changed with it. Go ahead - ask Bart to change the drive letter that "BartPE" uses. He can't. Why? Because he doesn't have the source code for the Windows Mount Manager - which is what would have to be (and what did have to be) changed to make that happen. You seem to equate the fact that since BartPE builds off features of another product that it is then the same as that product. I can see your theory, in that without WinPE the features required from WinXP would not exist...thus resulting in BartPE not working as it currently does. No, as I stated, BartPE would not exist if WinPE had not been created. Period. End of story. It never would have happened. If the Windows codebase had not been consciously changed to have MiniNT mode exist then Bart would have had no build code to reverse engineer. End of story. Nothing. DOS-based rescue CD's forever. See ya. Get it? Then you throw everything into chaos...well as far as I know unix has been out for ages, and since windows is effectively unix (An operating system), then windows is unix? Maybe that's not such a good example... Uh, no. That's totally different. There is no Unix code in Windows (unless it was licensed from some Unix vendor and I don't know about it) and there's no Windows code in Unix (unless it was licensed through Microsoft's overly complicated protocol licensing structure). Your analogy has nothing to do with what I've said. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. But this is...Netscape VS. Internet Explorer! Again, no. There is no shared code between those two products, except possibly content licensed from NCSA for both of them. Similar heritage through NS 4.x, but that's it at best. Do you see where, while you may not be wrong, most people don't agree with your logic? True, they are both web browsers, but they aren't the same product. True one may be copying anothers functions, but they do so using original techniques. One may not have been born if the other hadn't come out first...but if that held true then we are all driving Fords since they came out first. See my example above. Ask Bart to change core functionality of "BartPE". Ask him to, say, boot from an ISO formatted RAMDisk. What's that you say? He did? Uh. No. There were three poeple at Microsoft who developed patented technology specifically used to do that. Sure, "BartPE" can now do it. Why? Because his reverse engineered version of WinPE can do anything WinPE can. Why? Because it is WinPE. Bart has evaded legal issues for several reasons... Basically he has managed to walk a fine line with regard to reverse engineering. But as I stated, if Microsoft wanted to, they could come down hard, primarily on any customer using "BartPE" to any significant extent. And I would expect them to prosecute anyone who ever actually redistributed "BartPE" in it's entirety - since that isn't something Bart has legal rights to allow for. And the more I think about it, since the features like MiniNT are built-in to Window XP and not WinPE, then BartPE is even further removed from WinPE. At that point, even though those features might have been implimented for WinPE, both of the programs are accessing a feature of another program. And since that other program (WinXP) doesn't have any specific licensing issue with usage of that nature, then I don't even see where there is that problem anymore...other than running both a local copy and a BartPE from one license...that's still bad. There are features included in Windows XP that are there for the server version of Windows (what eventually became Server 2003). There are features in Home that are there for Pro. Hacking one to use it for the other isn't "okay" just because you can. Microsoft doesn't have 1001 teams working on functionality in complete silos. You write code for dev milestones. When Whistler shipped as Windows XP, WinPE also shipped. I'll come back to my main point. If the team doing the development did not do anything to develop WinPE, WinPE would not exist - and as a co-dependent, "BartPE" would not exist. If the development team did not do any ongoing work, then "BartPE" would not gain anything except for new build-time features and new high-level shell-type features where Bart can shim things back in. Want memory manager enhancements? Not going to come from Bart. Want the drive letter changed? Same deal. How about changing the way WinPE doesn't write to the registry, so that it does? Also not something Bart could do...

As I stated before - if WinPE didn't exist, BartPE wouldn't. As to the level that they "share code" it's basically a semantic argument - since BartPE is effectively WinPE.

And even if it does - are you sure WinPE supports the NIC that is in that system? It doesn't support the NIC's of numerous servers "in the box" - so would also fail to send mail.

Haha. There are ways to use WinPE without a video card... If you don't have a display adapter n it - how do you know it didn't come up?

Adding IE requires massive bloat in WinPE. I've nearly added all of it before for another project. But scrapped it because it just became too massive - and used FireFox instead.

Um... Explorer still won't run in that case. If you want "BartPE" functionality, use "BartPE". Using WinPE as a glorified Embedded OS really won't work right.

A couple of things - add the /makelocalsource and /tempdrive:C: options as well. You can omit DUDisable, since Dynamic Update isn't in Windows 2000. If you do that, does it still return errors?

You shouldn't ever have to reboot just to pick up a new partition - have you run rescan from diskpart after creating your new partition(s)?

Actually, if you use CD2, any CD1 that is XP Retail or XP OEM will work with it.

Whatever shell you are running is not present... That's what causes constant reboots 99% of the time.

XImage is the WIM file editor - it just hasn't been made available for every build that has come out. It will probably be released again at Beta 2.

This forum is for WinPE. There is a BartPE forum below.

No, the "no valid partitions" message is quite expected when you have just repartitioned the disk. You MUST either reboot or use the /syspart switch. Otherwise Windows does not know where to install to. I believe if you specify an unattend file for setup, that dialog will not occur. Have you done so?

The product key, not any one file, specifies whether a Pro install will be Pro, Tablet, or MCE. But to do that requires CD2 and a retail or OEM copy of Windows XP Pro (which is all "CD1" ever is).

If you use diskpart and do a clean, followed by creating a partition, an MBR will be created. A boot sector will be placed automatically by format - also set the disk as active. There is another post on the board with a script for creating and formatting a partition. If you do those steps, it will work fine.

If you partition using Diskpart and format using the command-line format tool, your disk will have a proper NT compatible boot sector and MBR

That is true, until LH, you cannot cross HAL's. But more often than not, if you have much control over your hardware, you can constrain it for limited HALs. Note also that if you have true uniproc (not singleproc), the HAL is interchangeable with a multiproc HAL if both are ACPI or both are APIC. But yes - since WIM has file single instancing, you can add in a second XP image (or a third, fourth, etc) and it will only grow by any new files you add, and the registry hives (which will differ). Be sure you delete the hiberfil and pagefile too, if you go the full sysprep route.

Why not just use a Sysprep image? WIM was designed to deploy actual Sysprep images - and that way you don't even have to wait for GUIMode to complete... Yes, I've done that - it works fine for 2000, XP, 2003...

Most major OEM's use SLP - meaning the box doesn't have to be activated at all... I guess this would matter in the cases where one bought a system from a smaller system builder who does not do SLP...

ERD Commander 2005 (from Winternals.com) can do what you want... not sure if you want to buy a commercial product or hack something together yourself.

If you remove the MiniNT switch, BartPE won't work at all. BartPE uses the entire boot codepath developed by Microsoft for WinPE - because it is WinPE. I don't understand why that doesn't convince you they are the same - but whatever... If WinPE didn't exist, BartPE wouldn't... It's really that simple. Bart was very creative in his reverse-engineering of WinPE, and indeed managed to out-do Microsoft as far as build tools. But at the end of the day it is just that - a reverse engineering of WinPE. Why do you think Bart called it BartPE? Just for giggles?

Weird - I thought I replied to this yesterday... Anyway, try https://www.copilot.com/ if Remote Desktop or VNC itself aren't working for you. Designed for exactly this scenario.

BartPE and WinPE are two different applications...totally different code. Nope. If WinPE had not been created by Microsoft, Bart would still be working on his old DOS based boot projects, and BartPE would not exist. The code for WinPE to run is strewn throughout Windows (XP and Server 2003) and relies on the presence of the MiniNT switch to tell the code what to do and what not to do - ranging from the kernel to the memory manager to winlogon. There is no bartpe.exe in WinPE, and there is no oscdimg.exe in BartPE. I'm not sure how you can draw an analog there. OSCDIMG is hardly needed for WinPE - it's simply the ISO creation aspect of WinPE. It's not there because Bart can't redistribute it, and he's come up with his own tool for building an ISO with boot code. They both take common windows files and arrange them specifically to their needs. They both have similar intended outcomes, being a bootable Win32 environment, but they accomplish it in different ways. Or not. If you compare the layout of BartPE with WinPE, it is identical. Tag files, ntdetect.com, setupldr txtsetup.sif, an I386 directory when on CD, a MiniNT directory when on HDD (ever wonder why that is?)... effectively identical - because it is using WinPE code to run 99.9% of it's functionality - except any aspects Bart or the BartPE community have written on top of it. The options that BartPE provides over WinPE are capable not because they are editing/hacking any source files, but because they include extra programs. I never said they were. The ADO, WSH, and HTA functionality originally shipped in WinPE were added in much the same way, albeit post-build instead of at build time. There was a reason for that, by the way. ...so to deem the products included with BartPE as illegal just because of the way they interact with the core functions (Remember, no M$ code is altered) invalidates all other third-party applications. 1) Why do people insist on saying "M$"? It's obnoxious. 2) no, you're again drawing in something I didn't say. I said any code that modifies the 24-hour timebomb is illegal. It's just like bypassing activation code. Not legal. Say it with me. Not legal. The MiniNT switch is verified, but calling a built-in function hardly seems like a problem. If that's the case, then all the things we do here on MSFN are illegal too! Au contraire. Years ago, Mark Russinovich discovered that two simple keys held the difference between Windows NT Workstation and Windows NT Server. Tweak those two keys, and you've turned a workstation product into a server (http://www.oreilly.com/news/differences_nt.html). Do you think that was legal? Me either. But that is what Bart allows customers to do. Convert one version of Windows into another. One they are licensed for into another they are not. It's up to you, the users of BartPE to determine if what you are doing is legal or not. You've chosen to believe Bart's rather liberal interpretation of the Windows XP EULA, and his choice to ignore the aspect of the EULA which reads: "Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in this EULA." Meaning if the section of the WinPE EULA that you missed by circumventing it could be applied to you anyway - at Microsoft's discretion. No, Microsoft hasn't chosen to go after anyone. Yet. However, they did go after Bart several times - see his site. If you work for a company of any size and are using BartPE instead of WinPE, personally I'd question that. But hey, caveat licensor. ...But as a tech, I don't see how anyone could say that BartPE is illegal from a technical point of view. I didn't say it was illegal from a technical point of view. I said it from a legal point of view. :-) It's at the discretion of whomever is using it to determine whether they think what they are doing is legal or not. Personally I don't think what Bart has done is that questionable - but he has put BartPE's users into an uncomfortable position of interpreting a EULA, or simply believing that Bart is correct in his rather liberal interpretation. But hey, it's just Microsoft, right? :-) but it doesn't look like they care much about it at the moment. Indeed. But ask yourself, if they went after one or two companies who were using it, would you still use it? BTW, I'm not trying to be an a-hole here. Just trying to honestly and openly discuss what BartPE is in relation to WinPE, and to get people to fully think about the legal aspects before using it.

No, you will have to reinstall - there is no way to convert one safely to the other.

Technically, there isn't one. WinPE and XP Embedded were created by two totally different teams at Microsoft for two totally different purposes. (Ironically the two teams today are now the same.) It is definitely possible to create an XPE image that looks and acts very similar to WinPE - and it's actually much easier to create a smaller version of XP Embedded than it is to streamline WinPE. Here again, bear in mind that WinPE was designed for a "white box" world where it needs to boot on anything. XP Embedded was designed for "black box" use, where the device manufactur (set-top box, point of sale device, thin client, etc) has complete understanding and control over the devices in the system. Bear in mind technically BartPE is WinPE - albeit a reverse-engineered version with a better build process - if one works for you, the other will. As to deciding which one you want to use, it basically comes down to: are you Are you building a system that needs a run-time copy of Windows included in it? If so, it's going to need Windows XP Embedded. Or are you building an environment/software product that you will need to distribute a copy of Windows with? Then you will need to use WinPE. Both have licensing programs for redistribution. Note there is no legal way for anyone to redisitribute BartPE. HTH, and feel free to reply if I didn't answer your question(s).