Making an OS image

[Will Anderson]

Alrighty...I've been able to create an image using a lot of the input from the crew on this site.

I've been taking the steps to manually format the disk and assign a drive letter and what not...plus actually applying the image so i get a better understanding of how things work.

Here's the question:

When I capture an image from the OS...do I need to use the /boot switch so it know that when the image is applied, the partition will be bootable?

The problem I'm having is that I applied the image successfully...but I get a black screen on reboot. I just hangs.

Any ideas? Forgive me for all the beginner questions.

[bj-kaiser]

imagex doesnt care for boot sectors, it just saves the files in the partition. you will have to apply a boot sector with bootsect.exe from the WAIK.

[zorphnog]

The /boot switch should only be used it you want to make a WinPE boot solution. It allows you to boot into a PE environment. If your image is of XP/2003 try using: bootsect /nt52 c: /force (where c: is your system drive). Now if you're trying to load the image on different hardware you may be having a host of different issues, but try the bootsect command first.

[Will Anderson]

Alrighty!

I managed to make the image bootable thanks to you both!

Unfortunately it bluescreened right off the bat, but I think that's a matter of not sysprepping the image and trying to place it on another machine. So I'll go ahead and try that out.

Now obviously, there's a lot to do in order to prep the drive for imaging, and then applying it to another drive. Can I just add an autoexec.bat to perform the diskpart, imagex and the bootsect to my ISO and have it run? Or do i need to modify something to do that?

I'm slowly but surely starting to understand this.

[bj-kaiser]

Now obviously, there's a lot to do in order to prep the drive for imaging, and then applying it to another drive. Can I just add an autoexec.bat to perform the diskpart, imagex and the bootsect to my ISO and have it run? Or do i need to modify something to do that?

tip: {yourPEImage}\windows\system32\startnet.cmd

read the Windows PE docs about it.

Edited August 23, 2007 by bj-kaiser

[p4ntb0y]

Well you can use.....

wimbom.ini as described in the DOC's and format the drive.

Also you can mark the drive as active in wimbom.ini

You can then use OEMRunonce for imagex.exe

For your image I would read up on referencing drivers with sysprep and don't forget the HAL are all your computers compatiable?

But again this can be done easy enougth by sealing the machine as "ACPI" and then run a script to update the sysprep.inf this could be done in OEMRunonce as well.

Or you can use startnet.cmd and then call scripts from there.....

call diskpart and call imagex

As stated in the previous post I would defo read the DOC's winpe.chm

[IcemanND]

Everything you are asking is here:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...mp;#entry674778

[sunny1552]

I had installed WAIK and followed the procedures desribed by MS to create WinPE2 disk ISO and burned it.

My question is whether it contains bootsect.exe file ? or do i have to manually add it in the image?

[sunny1552]

And @ Mr Anderson

I also did what u did + i sysprepped it and created the WIM but after applying it it agains shows up BSOD so sysprep doesnt fit in this bcos it crashes while WinXP boots up and Sysprep works after successful boting up.