ubernerd

WinImage or any other ISO opener tool will most likely work

As an IT professional I can only say that you shouldn't edit files if there is a similar solution for the problem without editing the files. You will get bitten at a later point. Of course I've tried nLite but that tool doesn't just add a driver, it completely changes the installation CD and that my friend is a big issue for me. My cooperation has a Microsoft Open License so we get updated Microsoft CD's. One thing is for sure, nLite doesn't generate files that are the same as Microsoft does. I've got a great ending line for my comment, it is something my teacher said to me in my first years at school and he sure was right. "Only monkey's use tools, you need to know the material itself" So true so true ... and a very nice tutorial

His blog is very silent, i'm starting to wonder if he's all talk ...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;DisplayLang=en

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en Ooops User Guide only link ...

Which error are you getting? does the unattend xml work on a unmodified Vista ISO? and what hardware are you testing on?

IBM REMBO can actually trap PXE requests from client and respond to them without any DHCP configuration pointing to the REMBO server.

My code looks at lot like your, only its for danish keyboard layout ... and its working very nicely How to you apply your unattend.xml file ? The recommeded method is to use wpeinit /unattend:<pathtounattendfile>, you could add this in startnet.cmd or Winpeshl.ini

You can use an unattend.xml file to avoid the keyboard dialog, the WAIK doc contains all the codes you need for your locales.

Hop over to the WinPE part of this forum and you'll find lots of people doing exactly the same as yourself. Yes you can push WinPE out using PXE (either by MS or other PXE servers, Linux is also confirmed to work) Partitioning and formatting can be done using diskpart (builtin winpe tool) and no it will not prolong your installation process as it can partition and format a disk within seconds.

You need to add the WMI and Scripting components to your WinPE build (again the WAIK contains the details) DiskPart should be builtin by default, also for x64 WinPE. Maybe you should search the WIM image for the file to verify it.

Bootsect.exe can be used on both WinXP, Win2003, WinPE and Vista.

You specify x86 or amd64 in the right places and the tools take care the rest. The WAIK contains both the 32 and 64 bit versions of WinPE, its all in the same download.

The WAIK contains a fully functional sample of doing this, the proces is the same as for 32bit (except for a platform argument when building the PE baseline)

What kind of customizations did you make to the image ?

Actually the authentication is handled by the boot images so I'm pretty sure you can't have any authentication before selecting the boot image in the WDS menu.

Normally it's a VGA driver problem that causes this. If you are testing on vmware using a RC build of Vista/WinPE 2.0 you will properly run into this problem, but you can force vmware to use 640x480 by editing the vmx file and insert svga.maxwidth="640" and svga.maxheight="480".

I'm curious ... why would you not load it into memory?

Well ZoRonNaX you've got my full attention now ...

add ethernet.virtualdev = "e1000" to your vmx file and you wont need any extra network drivers in winpe

First make sure you have the required drivers installed in your PE image and then use Windows System Image Manager to create an unattend.xml file that sets your required resolution.

Well it seems that the correct ip address is the one starting at position hex 107 so that problem is solved

Think you may want to slap in an actual command with that %SYSTEMROOT%\regedit.exe /s \\servername\share\file.reg the /s will remove any warnings and make it run silent

I plan to deploy several PXE servers to handle client boots and I would love to be able to identify the server that the client booted from so I can write scripts that work on all servers instead of having to specialize the scripts for each server. In searching for at solution for this, I came across this key in the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PXE Where there is a value containing what appears to be the BootServerReply, and I have identified the boot server address in at least two locations in the data, both I'm not sure which is which. Can anyone tell me how to decode these data or am I going down the wrong road here? Any other good ideas on the subject would be appriciated (<- misspelled ???) To clarify here is the registry data I have found I have highlighted the server ip address (0a,1e,01,c8 or 10.30.1.200) , which was found in four different locations.

The concept is that you boot of a WinPE image, normally you'd use the boot.wim from the Vista DVD to do this. The WinPE in boot.wim is built to show a list of install images defined in your WDS and will allow the user to select an image to install.