Help with WinPE

[indafunkyhouse]

Hello

Not sure if this is the right forum but I was wondering if anyone can help?

My flatmate has the same laptop as me (only difference being mine has more memory and came with vista home premium, hers with home basic and less memory).

Her laptop went a bit dodgy so she decided to do the factory restore which is located on a hidden partition on the drive. She did the F8 and selected the repair computer option (its an amilo li 3170 laptop) and vista did its thing reinstalling, however it kinda borked up on the installation and all that happens now when you try and boot is the blue screen of death with a memory dump, laptop restarts and it goes round and round in a continuous cycle.

Pressing F8 again does not give the option to do the repair anymore, so I assume the MBR has been stuffed in its attempt at reinstalling.

I have created a startup disk using WAIK and can see the partition with the .wim file on but I am unable to mount the file so I can see if I can access it to restart a repair job on vista.

Anyone know how I can mount the wim file? I have added the inf file needed from WAIK but it doesn't appear to work.

Or if anyone knows of any other way in which I can get the machine to repair it would be a great help!

Thanks in advance

*edit*

looks like the wimftlr.inf hasn't been loaded and i am unsure how to load this in dos so I can access the wim file

Edited December 28, 2009 by indafunkyhouse

[Tripredacus]

To load the INF, you do it from your PE. Also, if this WIM file is very large, you may have a problem as the amount of memory effects what you can do. Say for example you have 1GB of RAM, with base requirement of 512MB (or 300-400MB) used by the PE, and presuming your RAMDISK size is default. You would have about 512MB left for the system. If this WIM is larger than 512MB (likely is) you can't mount it in the PE.

[indafunkyhouse]

how do i get the inf file to run? tried doing it once its booted into the einvrionment but it keeps saying installation failed

And the wim file is over 4gb so am going to have big problems ha ha! but if i can get the wimfltr to load i can use the split option to split the file and move it to my laptop so i can try and create an iso to use from my laptop, if this is poss

[Tripredacus]

You should do all your WIM work from your Technician PC, using the WAIK/Windows PE Tools Command Prompt. Not from the booted PE. Using the PE Tools Command Prompt will use your hard drive/virtual memory/page file for the additional memory and won't be limited to the amount of physical RAM in the computer. The PE does not use the Hard Drive space at all for virtual memory.

I'm not certain about this INF, but from the PE you could use Drvload?

What packages did you load into your PE? I usually use HTA, WMI, XML, Scripting and MDAC as my 'stock' packages.

[indafunkyhouse]

i cant get the wim file off the other latptop as its too big to fit on to a dvd, i tried the imagex /split command but it splits it into two files, one being just over 1meg the other still way over 4gig, if i can get it on my latptop i might be able to create a dvd to repair the other laptop

i loaded HTA and XML packages as found a tutorial on the net

[Tripredacus]

It should be able to fit on a Dual-Layer DVD, presuming the drive in that machine can burn onto them. I'm guessing you don't have both computers at the same location, otherwise you could do a network copy.

[submix8c]

FWIW (re - the F8 no longer works / reinstall from recovery partition) -

lengthy similar topic

Edited December 29, 2009 by submix8c

[indafunkyhouse]

Yeah i have both latptops next to each other, didnt think i could get them connected via the ethernet cable, is this easier to do as i can grab the image off and see if i can work with it

and i will check out the other link to the post

[indafunkyhouse]

Made some progress using hirens bootcd it allowed me to boot the hidden partition to the fujitsu recovery program, however it runs and goes through the motions of installing everything, which i assume comes from the WIM file on the hidden partition. But when it gets near the end it just states an error has occurred. Is this something to do with the image file itself which is corrupt? as if so Fujitsu will end up with a moutful

[Tripredacus]

Made some progress using hirens bootcd ...

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