Colin

Hi, WinPE normally sets it's drive to X: when booted, C: remains the windows drive throughout the process ... I have tried the above solution and it works exactly as I required. I get a command file run once at boot time that changes the location of WinRE to the recovery partition instead of the one contained within windows itself. Col

Not a bad guess. Why don't you check loading the hive in a GUI Registry editor in the PE? At first sight, if you mount the SOFTWARE hive to a TEMP hive the path to the "right" key will be: HKLM\TEMP\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce because: HKLM\TEMP\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce should result in the booted windows as: HKLM\SOFTWARE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce (and BTW another reason to use the offline Registry editing) jaclaz Absolutely spot on, I didn't need \SOFTWARE in the REG ADD command. Drop that out and it works perfectly thank you.

Hi, thanks for your reply. Drive does only contain D: and not D:\ ... Strange thing when I run a REG QUERY on the added entry it comes up as - Act REG_SZ D:\Activate.cmd which is correct, now I have to figure out why the Activate.cmd is not running on booting into windows. The only thing I can think of is that I am not loading the correct hive in the REG LOAD HKLM\TEMP c:\windows\system32\config\software command

Hi, hoping someone can help me out. I need to inject a reg entry into the windows 8.1 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE RunOnce registry tree from within a WinPE 5.0 environment. So far I have the following as part of a command file; REG LOAD HKLM\TEMP c:\windows\system32\config\software (To load the correct hive into a temporary subkey) REG ADD HKLM\TEMP\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce /v Act /t REG_SZ /d "%Drive%\Activate.cmd" /f (to add the reg entry) REG UNLOAD HKLM\TEMP (to unload the hive from the subkey) Where %Drive& is the USB drive letter ... this all works .. but .. When checking the reg entry (using REG EXPORT to a file) is shows up as [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\TEMP\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\runonce] "Act"="D:\\Activate.cmd" Entry has two \\ instead of a single \ and does not execute the command file upon booting into Windows 8.1 Where have I gone wrong? Cheers in advance for any help.