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Slim Down WINPE


odopey

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Hello Fellow Members..

I'm working on a Windows XP Project Where we are using Miccorsoft BDD amd SMS to deploy and upgarde the client workstations.

The one thing we have been able to is load and Boot WinPE from Ram. The down side is that if we have a PC with 256Megs of Ram and run the BDD CD from RAM it blue screens.

Now when we run the same process on a PC with 512Megs of RAM everything run exactly as expected. So my thought is that my 170Meg WinPE ISO needs to be trimd down by 20 Megs as I read that you should have 100Megs free of Memory after your image is in RAM. So needless to say I'm short on memory.

Anyone have any idea? or tools that could help?

Thanks,

RS

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First of all there is a "file" that will "cut down" the size of the PE image included with the scripts released from MS (think it is something like SERVERSP1-REMOVELIST.TXT or XPSP2-REMOVELIST.TXT), found in the SAMPLE directory.

However, the SMS OSD Kit custom WinPE is NOT a ordinary WinPE (I think) as it is in a WIM format and so on (the shell is also changed). I would imagine that u would have to use the update WinPE option within the OSD section to have this new feature "sucked" into SMS.

I would try to build the minimized WinPE from the BDD interface firstly as u could intergrate the "minimizing" feature when pressing the "build iso" within the BDD interface. These are just pure speculations as I never have stumbled onto the issue so please dont take my word on it.

Best of luck to u and keep us posted (if that solves it for u or how u solved it).. :)

Tha Sausage Eater.

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Be aware that the removelist in PE cuts to much...

It will break a lot so use it as a guidance and do the stripping slowly by hand instead.

Ypu can cut 20 megs without problems but you can also create a realy nice mess

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Just a FYI... Removed 17Megs of Fonts and the did the job. Also to answer the BDD \ ZTI deployment CD's yes it is custom WinPE not WinPe 2005. If you want to boot WinPE into Ram you can use either WinXP SP source or Win2003 Srv SP1. I recommend using Win2003 SP1 as your source to build WinPE via BDD \ OSD as it reconizes HW and performs a lot cleaner.

Thx...

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Yes the new switches wich are reqquierd to boot into ram is only present in 2003Sp1 kernels and later.

Another thing to check is the size of the ramdrive. I had a simillar issue with PQI deploy there it wouldnt't load images larger than 2GB on 256MB systems. I reduced the ramdrive and that did it. Ofcource it works fine on 512 systems but this way we won't have to buy more memory to old machines wich will be sent of to the scarpheap during next year

Edited by mats
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Business Desktop Deployment (a whitepaper/architecture to help enterprise customers deploy) and Operating System Deployment - a component of SMS Service Pack 1 that helps with Windows Deployment - uses WinPE and an early version of the Longhorn WIM infrastructure to help companies upgrade to Windows XP.

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Thanks for the info. I'm dying to learn what WinPE can do and also getting a RIS server working. I just don't have much spare time learning and trying this stuff out to work out the bugs and get it into production. I have, however, got a nice unattended install CD going for the various flavors of XP with several APP's working.

I think my first step with winpe is using the winpe files with barts pebuilder and make one and use the sherpa xpe plugin.

Jim

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