Super Small WIM's?

[quantumriff]

As part of our lease agreement, all machines returned to the manufacturer need to "boot". they don't specify what they have to boot, just that they can boot up, to make sure we're not shipping back dead systems.

I am trying to build some automated steps using WinPE 3.0, to prepare the machines to be returned.

1. Diskpart, with a Clean ALL to wipe drive

2. Create a partition

3. Drop Dos, FreeDos, or WinPE onto the system so it boots.

Step 3 is giving me some trouble, I can't seem to use Imagex to lay down DOS on a partition. I am now looking for the smallest possible WIM file I can load onto a USB drive, to load onto a system. For Simplicity sake, i need to basically embed this wim, inside the boot.wim that I would be using on the boot devices. That makes it difficult to use smaller USB drives.

Does anyone have a link to a very small WIM file that is free to use, or can tell me how to cut a WinPE 3 file WAY down (under 50MB would be preferred.) so that I can fit my entire setup onto a 256MB drive? (we have some other tools we run in WinPE as well that take up space)

[quantumriff]

After a bit of reading, and lots and lots of tinkering, came up with this solution, in case anyone is interested.

Instead of another wim file, which wasn't wanting to work well anyways, I am just re-using the current files for the USB drive, so its not using any more space on the drive.

Now, I'm looking to see if I can somehow, inside WinPE, open the c:\sources\boot.wim file that I copy to the C drive, and remove some Company Specific stuff

From My batch file.. ( I have left out some stuff, like menu's and company stuff, etc...)

REM Figure out which "drive" the USB drive or CD is assigned.

set CustFileName=bootmgr

if exist c:\%CustFileName% set driveLtr=c:\
if exist d:\%CustFileName% set driveLtr=d:\
if exist e:\%CustFileName% set driveLtr=e:\
if exist f:\%CustFileName% set driveLtr=f:\
if exist g:\%CustFileName% set driveLtr=g:\
if exist h:\%CustFileName% set driveLtr=h:\
if exist x:\%CustFileName% set driveLtr=x:\

REM Wipe and format the drive

echo This can take quite some time.
echo started at:
Time /t
%SystemRoot%\System32\diskpart.exe /s erasescript.txt
echo Ended at:
Time /t 

REM Copy files and directories from the USB drive
REM I have lots of other crap on my USB drive (portatech, etc), so I don't just copy the whole drive..

xcopy %driveLtr%boot\*.* c:\Boot\ /e/h/f
xcopy %driveLtr%EFI\*.* c:\EFI\ /e/h/f
xcopy %driveLtr%Servicing\*.* c:\Servicing\ /e/h/f
xcopy %driveLtr%sources\*.* c:\sources\ /e/h/f
copy /y %driveLtr%bootmgr c:\

REM Reboot

%SystemRoot%\System32\wpeutil reboot
[/font]

***************

EraseScript.txt has:

select disk 0

clean all

create partition primary SIZE=2048

select partition 1

active

format quick fs=Fat32

assign letter=C

exit

***************

[Tripredacus]

Windows PE has some distribution rules. Make sure you read the docs for WAIK or OPK Tools before considering putting Win PE 3.0 on any of these computers to safeguard your company against possible EULA violations.