mickregan

From my limited experience, I'd say that the step "4. bootsect /nt60 e:\" hasn't worked properly because the files were in use on the drive. I experienced the same and tried again. After a "full" format in Vista, careful "Safely Remove Hardware", bootsect with the /force tag included and another "Safe Removal" mine started working. Handy hint: try bootsect-ing before copying files to usb drive. test booting an empty drive and see if it looks for "bootmgr". I have no other suggestion but trial and error with USB ports and an empty USB drive.

The Latest BDD (using for work). The latest "Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) User's Guide" (11/05/2006) from MS has the same info. Cheers

I tried all this and got a Windows Boot Manager "System Error - 0x0000017" Unknown error or something. Have you come across this yet? Just learned an important lesson. MS changes things in each build, so using the winpe.wim from the WAIK will not be all that compatible with say July CTP build 5472. I know, derrr, I'm stupid but i guess it did teach me a fair bit. - Also, if anyone is having trouble copying over the .dll's because of write protection/system errors, - try MOVING all the .dll's from the boot.wim to another dir (called backups). - - Next copy the required .dll's from the install.wim to the boot.wim. - - Then MOVE the .dll's from the backups dir and DO NOT OVERWRITE (this is the reverse workaround). - - Hold shift and click "No" for effectively a "No to All" type action. - - This should only have added 10-15 files to you boot.wim Continue as per instructions above.

Posted this over on my thread. Hope it helps.

As far as I can see the ImageX tool is capabale of imaging and compressing XP with SP2. The main consideration is that while Vista is Hardware Agnostic (doesn't care where you redeploy the image), Windows XP will still have a fit if the hardware changes too much. the command should look something like - imagex.exe /capture d: c:\XPSP2.wim "MyWinXP-SP2" /verify - d: is your XPSP2 root drive - c:\ is the location to save the WIM file - "MyWinXP-SP2" any name you want for your image Cheers

The Vista requirement appeared to be because of some sort of Formatting differences with the FAT32 USB format. I have since found, as you did, that any FAT32 format will do. The main trick is to get the MBR of the floppy to look for the "bootmgr" file instead of "ntldr" or "IO.sys". Which is exactly what you've done with "bootsect.exe /nt60 d:" (where d: is your newly formated usb device). As far as I know the current versions do not natively support anything other than US English. Undoubtably this more to do with Registry settings and Language folders not in the winpe.wim than anything. I'm not even gonna try that yet. I'm still wooping about getting my key to boot. Okay, I now know more. From WAIK help file: - -Add a Language Pack - -The following procedure demonstrates how to use PEImg to add a language pack to a Windows PE image -offline. Before you can run any PEImg command, you must first apply or mount the base Windows PE -image (winpe.wim) using ImageX. - -The /lang command sets the locale and the UI language of a Windows PE image. A language pack for the -specified language must already be installed. You can perform this on a Windows PE image that was -previously prepared with /prep. - -To add a language pack to a Windows PE image offline: - -peimg /lang=<culture> <image path>, for example -peimg /lang=en-us c:\winpe_x86\mount\Windows Cheers

Find GDISK.EXE and check your XP partition is active. Ghost in some cases does not activate the reimaged partitions. Make sure that you have adequate backups before using this utility!!! command - (Where X:\ is the root of bootable media) X:\>gdisk.exe /? (Shows all switches for all drives) X:\>gdisk.exe (View all Hard Drives on System and total partitons on each) X:\>gdisk.exe 1 /? (Shows all switches for 1st drive) X:\>gdisk.exe 1 (View 1st Hard Drive and and Partition Flags, ie. H - Hidden, A - Active) X:\>gdisk.exe 1 /act /p:2 (Will mark Disk 1 partition 2 Active) Be cautious and check thoroughly that you are actually changing the drive/partiton you want to. Best practice, disconnect all non essential Hard Drives prior to attempt. I use this tool and learned very quickly to be careful. wiped the 60GB laptop drive's partion info and BLAT. no drive.

Searching away and couldn't find this here. WAIK User's Guide - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en Download and open the WAIK.chm (help file). Search for "boot" and "ufd". Follow instructions for "Building a Technician Computer" then continue the Walkthrough. You will need: - - .NET Framework 2.0 - The latest Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) from the Vista Beta 2 CPP. (It contains the actual WAIK, ImageX, etc). - A relatively new USB Flash Drive (for good read/write speeds). The size of the UFD device must be at least 64MB larger than your Windows PE image. - Access to a computer running Windows Vista. I hope this is enough info. I am going to play tonight as my work's Dev Lab is currently not setup with any Vista Boxes. Cheers. PS. I'm not sure if this is stupidly obvious info. It did take a while to figure out what I was even looking for...