ubernerd

I have used this solution for a while and it works pretty well for all systems. Build an image for acpi single processor, and let sysprep handle the switch to multicore hal if required (I use wmi to get the number of cores on the chip). Oh and btw this switch is actually supported by MS, the switch from the old advanced acpi to acpi single- or multiprocessor is not supported. This will work for most current systems, but if you have any older systems that requires the old Advanced ACPI thing, you can hack the correct HAL files onto the c: drive after deploying the image and before starting minisetup, I do this as part of the process where I add the correct drivers for the model identified from the SMBIOS data. I also kick out any references to Intelppm in the registry. Using this principle I avoid having multiple images for a single OS, it does however require a fair amount of scripting for it to work as described.

To support XML you have to add the XML component using peimg To connect to a database, add the MDAC compoment using peimg (I know it works with MS-SQL) I have no idea if Flash will work, if I remember correctly Flash uses DirectX for accelerating graphics and this relies heavily on the graphics driver, and WinPe uses a common VGA driver so I would imagine that it will not do very well, but hey give it a try.

Why not have your script launch wpeinit before it does whatever it has to do. I use winpeshl.ini to launch a vb6 application that calls wpeinit before mounting and accessing network drives and stuff. Works perfectly Oh and there is no ugly DOS boxes in my solution

Normally my Images (500MB to 1.9 GB) deploy in between 4 and 10 minutes depending on the size (using a gb network) This goes for both WDS and winpe/imagex deployments. You may wanna look into your network config, as that is normally the source of speedproblems

I have done some coding with the wimgapi.dll and there is no way you can make vb6 callbacks with the WIMMessageCallback function as VB6 uses a STA (single threaded appartment) model for all its events, and wimgapi.dll uses the MTA (multi threaded appartment) model for the callbacks. The only solution I found was to built an ActiveX component (in native C++ code) that receives the callbacks and handles the callback as an normal ActiveX events. I'm unable to share the code as it is part of our commerical solution, but I'll provide hint and pointers if anyone is interrested. If anyone has another solution to this I'd like to know about it. Preferable one that does not include endless hours of C++ coding (not my strongest language)

I agree completly, but you know customers, they sometimes just dont listen to common sense. USB and DOS is bad news IMO

Hi all I just got an odd question from a customer, he want to boot a PC into PXE using a USB netcard, and he wants recommendations on wath to buy. Anyone have any experience with this, and if so can you recommend any product, preferably product which include support for DOS as well. /ubernerd

We managed to get it to run with 316 MB in vmware, so 384 would be the minimum for actual hardware I guess

Didn't remove anything at all

Mine is only 113 MB and I have added all the extras and some additional tools and stuff.

WinPE 2.0 runs very unstable on systems with less than 316 MB memory. We have done a lot of testing on this limit, and one of the symptoms we encountered was problems with network traffic. Remember its built on the Vista codebase, and Vista doesn't support systems with 256 MB memory.

If the datafiles on the partition is readable by Windows/WinPE, it should be possible, remember ImageX is filebased and not disk/sector based like Ghost/PQIDeploy. It will require some scripting/coding to handle but as you have access to VBScript and WMI from WinPE, it should be fairly easy to solve this.

WMI has a class for handling registry, and it has a method for reading binary values into an array. From there on its plain vbscript coding

The DHCP/PXE reply that WinPE is booted from is stored in the registry HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PXE, in this block of bytes you can find the IP address used to boot WinPE Once you have that scan thru Win32_NetworkAdapters in WMI and find the NIC with the IP address you found in ther previous step Get the MAC address property of the win32_NetworkAdapter and you're done. All theses steps can be done using vbscript.

You could disable SATA native mode in BIOS and the nyou should be able to install the driver and switch back again. I think the method is described in a file in the driver kit ( it was for my NW8440)