Driver trouble with WinPE 2

[Deman]

Hi all,

I'm having difficulty getting our new(ish) HP D510's to gain network access, (despite WinPE booting from the network!?)

I've tried a number of different drivers using the peimg /inf: etc commands and while they do go into the mount\windows\etc directories WinPE still can't access the network.

In desperation I installed Windows, installed the NIC (Intel 10/100 VM) so to ensure that yes the drivers do indeed work. After a bit of searching somebody suggested to copy all the driver files used for the NIC to their equivalent paths in WinPE, but that didn't work either.

I even went back to the HP site and downloaded their other NIC drivers they had available, the older Intel drivers would work in XP, but not in WinPE. They also had some Broadcom ones but they didn't work in XP, let alone WinPE.

I've run out of ideas here, the boot wim is fine for all our other machines, including one or two that are far newer than the D510 series. Does anybody have any suggestions?

[IcemanND]

do they have Vista drivers? Since PE 2 is based on vista it may not be liking the XP drivers.

[zorphnog]

If you install them manually to your PE image you must place the driver inf in the \Windows\inf folder, and the source files in the \Windows\System32\drivers folder. Since it is a network driver, be sure to rename the .inf file by prefixing it with "net" i.e. e1000.inf becomes nete1000.inf.

[zorphnog]

By the way, the reason you can boot from network is because when you boot from the network you use a universal driver. All PXE-enabled NICs can use the universal driver, but once the PE environment loads you need the NIC specific driver.

[Deman]

Thanks for your suggestions guys, I've tried them all with several variations and still no luck.

I renamed the inf file to give the "net" prefix, no such luck

I found a Vista and XP2K driver on the Intel site and did both the peimg /inf command and also the manual copy for both, again no luck there.

I found a walkthrough here which spoke about adding the cat file to \winsxs\manifests which I also tried, with both the drivers I mentioned above and their example. Again no luck, mind you given the year it was posted I'd say they were using WinPE and not WinPE2

What is it with the D510 that makes things so difficult

Not to mention frustrating

The only difference I see when I copied the files over manually was the WinPE background would dissapear and be replaced with a black background. Other than that, still the same error

"Unable to contact IP driver error code 1753"

Edit: After a bit more investigation I've found you can use the drvload utility to attempt to load the driver but when I attempted that I got the code 0xe0000233 which is nice, sadly Google showed nothing about what it could mean.

Interestingly enough when I ran the command again I got 0x80070070. Bizzare, sometimes you get the former, othertimes you get the latter.

Edit again. I threw in an extra 256mb of RAM (totalling 512) and it worked. On the original boot.wim

I am going to kick something

Seriously though, I'm a bit curious about that, as our old celerons with only 256mb of RAM have managed to boot into it, it was off a CD-ROM though... hmm that could be the reason

Edited July 22, 2007 by Deman

[Jazkal]

Edit again. I threw in an extra 256mb of RAM (totalling 512) and it worked. On the original boot.wim

I am going to kick something

Seriously though, I'm a bit curious about that, as our old celerons with only 256mb of RAM have managed to boot into it, it was off a CD-ROM though... hmm that could be the reason

I haven't done any testing on this (I'm lucky, all our systems have a min of 512mb), but others have pushed the PXE boot ram requirements. And I think the min ram needed to boot via PXE was 384mb, or somewhere around that amount.

[patatwork]

Well WinPE 2.0 by default copies it self to ram drive then runs from the ram drive. So if you PE CD is larger than the free amount of ram it can not load all of the drivers because it ran out of memory. I wish there was some error message when something like this happens.

Your can try an make the PE CD smaller by removing stuff from your image or run from CD and not a RAM drive(this option is very slow). I am not sure how to do either one of those. I have just been adding more memory to the units that have less than 256.

[p4ntb0y]

I just like to say that winpe 2 works on the following hardware for NIC's and Mass Storage Device's..

D500

D510

D530

D230

DX5150

DC7100

DC7600

DC7700

600C

620C

NC6000

NC6220

NC6400

I had to go back to Winpe 2005 as networking and diskpart would not work propaly with some of the older models.

My winpe 2 image was around 120mb Which I beleive is fine for booting systems with 256mb of ram some work great others struggle.

Its a shame I had to go back to 2005 has anyone got their winpe 2 imagex smaller than 120mb This has scripting support and HTA packages.

Maybe reducing the winpe image further will help.

[Tripredacus]

Do you get an error after you run the initializenetwork command?