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Can Windows PE Help Me?


Bangers

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Currently I am using MSDOS network bootdisks (Barts) and this is basically how Windows 2000/XP Is being installed.

Load Bootdisk, map network drives, then I created an unattend.bat which does the following.

First time it's run (it sets a flag.txt file) it uses gdisk to do a format and creates a 2gb fat16 partition.

Then reboots, then back into the bootdisk, then when you run unattend.bat again it sees the flag.txt file, and starts installing windows passing it the unattend.txt file and the i386 DIR as parameters.

It works, and it's good, but it annoys me that I need to do two reboots to start the install.

I'm trying to streamline this process as much as possible, one day having a system which running a single .bat file, will install Windows, with all drivers slipstreamed. Allowing me to install it onto any system with any hardware config, and it won't need F6 for SCSI/RAID drivers, and it will auto install all video cads/NICs etc.

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That's just what I'm trying to do : replace DOS with PE for preinstallation tasks...you're the first person I "meet" who does something like this, and I work on this since three months now :)

I'm working with the official PE.

I don't know if PE could solve your "reboot problem" but with PE, I've LOTS of problems related with drivers, for example (although PE is a very good OS for tasks like configuring installation, you can't do anything with PE itself, it's heavyly "protected"...). Now if you use BartPE, I don't know if it would be better.

Using PE as replacement of DOS is something very...I don't find the word...I mean there's VERY few people that do it now, even specialised firms are just beginning to work with PE like that. Even Microsoft can't answer, for some questions about PE, and there's just one person knowing WinPE who works in HP....and we hope we don't know more about PE than him.

It's very useful for OEM and simple preinstallation tasks (configuration of the sysprep/riprep image, for example), but if you want to go further with PE itself (adding drivers, or test the hardware), it will be hard for the moment (PE doesn't yet support the RAM drives for example). You can't do anything more with PE as a preinstallation environment than with DOS (hum, well, I'm exagerating a bit :rolleyes:)

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You can get a ramdrive in PE pretty easily... along with a ton of other programs and drivers.

Maybe with BartPE or with plugins for BartPE which work with the official PE. But when you can only use the official PE...you must wait for the next release!

I work in a firm that uses only Microsoft products, and the technical service/hotline is something very important (and expensive..) here. If we use programs that are not in PE, Microsoft won't give the technical support. I think you understand the problem I have...

Shortly, my problem is "if it's not official, I can't use". And officially, there's no ram drive in PE for the moment, and the only drivers that are supported are network and disk drivers. We have to many PC's and different configurations, we can't take any risk.

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uhm.. i disagree im sitting here with one right now... you just have to enable the ramdrive. although i dont know if they would say that it is "Undocumented".

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Him, I read here that ram drives will only be supported in the next release and I found nothing about it in my PE documentation...did I do a mistake? Where can I find information about this? I don't know how to activate it!

Nevertheless, it's only a little part of my problems :rolleyes:

Edit : oh, well...

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=16886

I don't know if it's official, but it's something that uses only Microsoft products...I'll try. And sorry for the off-topic :) But it seems these methods don't work each time...It will be hard to say that to my boss : "I will use a method that can work...no, it doesn't come from Microsoft..." :D

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Oh...I found it...you can read all the doc coming with PE, you won't find the word "ram drive"...yeah, you can hit me with 17'' screens, I work on it since some months, and I didn't see something as "big" as this all this time. (last "off-topic")

PE is a good product, they just forgot something : the documentation. For all what I did, I found the informations I needed on this forum, and never on Microsoft website or documentation. Thanks a lot!

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To get back on topic,

Yes using PE can help you streamline your Windows setup and do away with reboots. At one time I used bootdisks to connect to the network and go through Fdisk and all with multiple reboots, converting to NTFS etc. About 12-16 months ago I started using WinPE and have continually learned how made our OS process smoother, moving from bat files to scripts. Just recently I was told about the /syspart:C switch, I had never really paid attention too it, which allowed me to take out a reboot.

Now, I just prompt the tech for their username/password, computername, Office version, etc and write several scripts to the HD that xcopies i386, Patches, and drivers to the HD then kicks off setup. Once that completes, it kicks off an application script that installs standard apps. If you search around on this board, I posted a zip file that contains the scripts to do this.

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Just recently I was told about the /syspart:C switch,  I had never really paid attention too it, which allowed me to take out a reboot.

Can you expand on this more please?

Basically, my biggest problem (and most annoying thing) - is the initial reboot to start setup.

To insytall XP currently on any computer (whether it has or hasn't got an OS), I'm doing the following

GDisk to format

reboot to detect new 2Gb fat16 partition

then start winnt.exe

If I could tell Windows XP setup (and windows 2000) inside setup itself, to format the first drive in the computer using NTFS to it's fullsize, and continue (because when you do a MANUAL XP install, you can EASILY do this) this will cutout the need to reboot which is what i want...

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Diskpart.txt

DISKPART
   SEL DIS 0
   CLEAN
   CRE PAR PRI
   ACT
   ASSIGN LETTER C
EXIT

CallDiskpart.bat

%SYSTEMDRIVE%\I386\system32\Diskpart.exe /s Diskpart.txt

To format the drive use this:

format C: /fs:ntfs /v:(volume_label)  /q /y

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Just recently I was told about the /syspart:C switch,  I had never really paid attention too it, which allowed me to take out a reboot.

Can you expand on this more please?

Basically, my biggest problem (and most annoying thing) - is the initial reboot to start setup.

To insytall XP currently on any computer (whether it has or hasn't got an OS), I'm doing the following

GDisk to format

reboot to detect new 2Gb fat16 partition

then start winnt.exe

If I could tell Windows XP setup (and windows 2000) inside setup itself, to format the first drive in the computer using NTFS to it's fullsize, and continue (because when you do a MANUAL XP install, you can EASILY do this) this will cutout the need to reboot which is what i want...

With PE, using the Diskpart code that likuidkewl posted you could run diskpart and configure the disk as one large partition, format the new drive, then run winnt32 with the /Syspart:C (from likuidkewl also IRC) /Tempdrive:C /Unattend:unattend.txt switches Which would allow you to do away with a reboot after partitioning the HD. I am still testing the /Syspart switch and have liked it so far. Ran into a weird problem with a 2000 setup that thought I was trying to upgrade PE but I think I may be able to get around that. Need to try and recreate the problem and see if it was something I did or just a fluke.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is also what I am attempting to do. Currently we are using the RDP package from HP that works in conjunction with Altiris. The current method works well in our data centers where we have a pxe boot set up. However when we do this at a remote site we need to keep flipping a floppy disk in and out in order to read the stage flag. I am trying to get winpe to work with Altiris but I don't think their bootwork.exe will run in PE (32bit OS).

Evilguinness: Have you looked into using ADS from MS? That is fully supported and it also uses WinPE as a boot media. ADS is part of MS's DSI which is a long term design guideline so it won't be going away anytime soon.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003...ds/default.mspx

You might also want to look at MSA 2.0 which does some of the same things but actually works to provision the servers also. While reading this documentation, in Chapter 5 MS gives the instructions for incorporating a RAM Drive into WinPE. Which works very well you need to have at least 256MB of RAM or the ram drive will not be created.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documen...k/vmhtm149.mspx

Jeff

BTW: Guinness is anything but evil!

:)

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