WPEINIT Black Screen (Weird!)

[clodhoppers18]

I am having a heck of a time with Windows PE and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.

I do the following:

I have had a working WDS/MDT configuration for about 4 months now.

As I am testing, I decide to deploy to 5 PCs via booting to CD

I boot to CD on one, kick off the install, and all is well

I go to ANY of the other 4 PCs and it boots WinPE, but when it starts wpeinit it goes to the next line in command prompt, and refuses to start even if I attempt to start it manually.

Additionally, when it completes wpeinit for the first time the custom background is shown, however after manually kicking it off, it shows a black background.

Whats super confusing is that I conduct a repair of the WAIK and then the deployment works fine for another PC, however when I go to deploy it to the remaining 3 PCs, it does the same as after the first.

I have made the following modifications to the Windows PE LiteTouchBootable wim file:

I have changed the startnet.cmd so that it pings itself after initializing the network, so that I do not get a time out error and it say that it cannot connect to the deployment server.

I have approximately 200 computers to deploy to, and refuse to reinstall the WAIK everytime I deploy.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what is going on?

[clodhoppers18]

Something VERY interesting I noticed is this:

I have an old CD (From May 15) that has been working for sometime.

If I leave the network cable unplugged, Windows PE presents an error and says "Check Physical Connection"

After this issue began lately, It now does the same wpeinit, however it seems like it is not checking the network connection as it was for the past several months. what is even MORE confusing is this is booting from a CD, so there could not have been any changes made to Windows PE on that disc.

Any further ideas?

[Tripredacus]

Only time have seen WPEINIT not complete or take a really long period of time is on certain motherboards that don't seem to fully support the PE, or I didn't put in the correct drivers. If your CDs haven't changed, has your hardware?

If you are actively deploying using the WinPE you might want to look into doing a network boot.

Or you can try reburning a disk.

Are you using the latest Servicing update (Vista 1.1 Package) in your PE?

[clodhoppers18]

My hardware is the same on the PCs I have deployed to before.

I have tried 5 different CDs, and they all have slight changes in the drivers, the oldest is known to work on this model, and the latest is also known to work, but only once. The others in between have also worked. I have reburnt the CD several times with different sets of drivers (some older some newer, etc.) I have also removed the changes I have made to WinPE (The startnet.cmd I changed so that it would ping itself before it started WPEINIT so that it would have the time it needed. I am not aware of what version of WinPE I am using, but WAIK says that it is the latest version when I check for updates within the Deployment Workbench.

Currently we are deploying from a small Windows XP machine, so PXE boot isnt an option at the moment.

Before we deploy, we plan on migrating to a Server '08 box that we have.

Any further ideas?

At this point, I am ready to rebuild the deployment server.

[Tripredacus]

OK so you are using an XP computer as the network share, so you aren't using WDS then.

You should be able to break the wpeinit process (Ctrl+C) when it is running in the startnet.cmd after you feel that it isn't doing anything anymore. I would say it should complete within 2-3 minutes before moving along to the next item in your startnet.cmd. After you break it, you should be able to launch notepad by just typing it at the prompt. Notepad is included in the default WinPE that comes with the current WAIK and OPK. Afterwhich, you can view the wpeinit's logfile to see if it has any interesting info in there.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748941.aspx

I use the OPK and not the WAIK. It is basically the same thing, but due to licensing reasons, Microsoft requires us to use the OPK and not the WAIK.