Jump to content

WDS and Vista


Recommended Posts

All,

I think I am missing a fundamental understanding of how WDS works, so maybe someone can answer a few questions I have. I find the myriad of walkthroughs and help pages that come with the WAIK to be so confusing that I can't really get anything useful out of them.

I have WDS set up and running and I've added both the default WinPE image to the boot images and 3 versions of Vista RTM to the install images on the WDS server. My question is, where do I go from here? Following the "Deploying an image using WDS" I should just be able to network boot to the WDS server, select the boot image (I only have one at the moment), and then click next to begin the installation.

However, I can PXE boot and connect to the WDS server and it downloads the WinPE image but then it launches startnet.cmd and just sits. What does this have to do with picking one of my install.wim files from the Install Images section of the WDS server?

One thing I could do is modify the WinPE image to change startnet.cmd to map a network drive and then run setup.exe with an autounattend.xml, but that defeats the purpose of the Install images in WDS. Also, when I tried to do that it was unable to because it had no NIC drivers (which I couldn't really figure out how to set up when reading through the documentation).

I feel like I'm going in the wrong direction, so if someone could point out some things that might help or something that I'm doing wrong it'd be appreciated :D

Thanks in advance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


I think you may have added the wrong PE image. I noticed all the custom PE images I make have only 1 volume of course in the WIM. But the boot image I added from my technet dvd of Vista has two volumes. I am about to start a PSS call for this on Monday. I then decided to add my drivers to a copy of the default boot image that works, as this one launches setup correctly. Now I have drivers in it to do setup for me:p

I have some other issues, but I am this far at least...

Ritmo2k

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...