Questions about WinPE

[Will Anderson]

Hey guys,

I'm investigating new options for imaging since Ghost 2003 is no longer reliable in this new SATA world.

I'm doing some work with ImageX right now and reviewing WinPE and the WAIK tools. I was wondering if you guys might be able to answer some questions.

I'm able to image a system drive with ImageX (easier than it looked!) and now I have my .wim file. I was wondering the following:

1) Can you use WinPE or the WAIK to basically decompile a .wim image from a machine to capture all of the system settings that you have done? For our global image, a lot of registry string and default configs are made, and although i know they can be done manually in the different text files, being able to decompile a preconfig'd image would be nice.

2) Can you remove the HAL configuration for Single and Multi Processor PC's so the image can be universal?

3) Is there a Microsoft Press Book available for ImageX, WinPE and WAIK? I'm sure there's a For Dummies book out there...but it would stick out in my current library...and you look less of a supergenius with a Dummies book by your side.

Thanks for your answers! I'm very enthusiastic about WinPE, I just need to get the gears rollin.

Best Regards,

[zorphnog]

1) You can't "decompile" an image, but you can mount it for editing using /mountrw. I'm a little confused by what you are trying to do here. Are these settings you are trying to set specific to each machine, or the same for all machines? If its the same, then why not just make the changes before you take an image of the system?

2) Depends on what version of Windows you are deploying. Deploying Vista is supposed to be hardware independent. I haven't tried it yet as it will be quite some time before we go to Vista, but from what I've heard HALs are a thing of the past once you go to Vista. If you're still on XP/2003 then you will still have to account for HALs. The nice thing about the PE environment is that you can check which HAL is loaded on the host machine via the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\Root\ACPI_HAL000\HardwareId). You can then add the correct entry to the sysprep.inf file to load the correct HAL.

3) I have no idea. Its a farily new topic so just search amazon or something.

[tap52384]

7-zip also has WIM support if you just need to extract a file from a WIM; I do not believe it has the ability to create them, but getting a file out without mounting isn't bad at all.

I have a question conerning ImageX; let's say you have two hard drives, both with a C: drive on them and working XP's on each. On drive 1, I have 2 partitions, C: D:. On drive 2, I have only 1 partition (which was drive C: in the laptop it came from).

However, when you boot into WinPE, the C: drive on HDD1 is called the C: drive, which makes sense because this drive is on the primary ide connection. However, the C: drive on HDD2 is called D:, probably because it is the primary partition on the slave IDE connection. Let's say I run the following command:

imagex /capture /verify /check d: z:\backup.wim "backup!"

This is the question; since the drive I created a WIM from was called the D: drive at the time of capture using ImageX, if I were to put the drive back into its original laptop so the drive letter will be C: again, do you think the image will apply itself properly?

Thanks for your time.

[Will Anderson]

1) You can't "decompile" an image, but you can mount it for editing using /mountrw. I'm a little confused by what you are trying to do here. Are these settings you are trying to set specific to each machine, or the same for all machines? If its the same, then why not just make the changes before you take an image of the system?

2) Depends on what version of Windows you are deploying. Deploying Vista is supposed to be hardware independent. I haven't tried it yet as it will be quite some time before we go to Vista, but from what I've heard HALs are a thing of the past once you go to Vista. If you're still on XP/2003 then you will still have to account for HALs. The nice thing about the PE environment is that you can check which HAL is loaded on the host machine via the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\Root\ACPI_HAL000\HardwareId). You can then add the correct entry to the sysprep.inf file to load the correct HAL.

3) I have no idea. Its a farily new topic so just search amazon or something.

Thanks for the assist zorphnog. Basically I was just wondering if I could take an image in imagex and decompile it like ghost where you can drop in additional files and what not and recompile it...but yeah...I could make those changes too...

Thanks for taking the time to answer. I'm having a few issues with getting my image to load to a second laptop right now, but it appears to be a disk formatting issue. If I keep having issues I'll post here again. This place has tons of info. I'm glad I signed up!

[Chdboy4]

I have a question conerning ImageX; let's say you have two hard drives, both with a C: drive on them and working XP's on each. On drive 1, I have 2 partitions, C: D:. On drive 2, I have only 1 partition (which was drive C: in the laptop it came from).

However, when you boot into WinPE, the C: drive on HDD1 is called the C: drive, which makes sense because this drive is on the primary ide connection. However, the C: drive on HDD2 is called D:, probably because it is the primary partition on the slave IDE connection. Let's say I run the following command:

imagex /capture /verify /check d: z:\backup.wim "backup!"

This is the question; since the drive I created a WIM from was called the D: drive at the time of capture using ImageX, if I were to put the drive back into its original laptop so the drive letter will be C: again, do you think the image will apply itself properly?

Thanks for your time.

Shouldn't as drive letters are not captured with the image, only files, as WIM's are file based and not sector based, any hard drive/partition with enough space will work. Also you can reassign drive letters with Diskpart, to make any partition C: again.

Hope this helps.

[IcemanND]

Not to toot my own horn but there is a Guide here at MSFN on capturing systems using imagex. see: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...st&p=674778