I was wondering if windows pe would run on a pentium 200 mmx with 32 mb ram. I downloaded the trial version of Microsoft Virtual PC, created a virtual pc with 32 mb ram, moved WinPE to the hard drive. This works fine but things go wrong with networking. The standard netcfg doesn't work and the penetcfg plugin hangs with an low virtual memory error. When i edit the system to 64 mb ram it works perfectly.
Is there some option to use and/or increase the pagefile in WinPE? I tryed to edit some key's like PagePoolSize with regedit but that didn't work. Maby there is another networking tool?

Well, too bad that nobody has replied on my message yet. The good news is that i've made a little progress. It's possible to edit and activate the pagefile size through SETUPREG.HIV. Here's how to:

(I suppose every WinPE user can start regedit, with a graphical shell click start, run, regedit. Users with commandline acces can just type regedit)

start regedit
Click on "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE"
Click on "File", select "Load HIVE"
At the filename box type "C:\Minint\SYSTEM32\SETUPREG.HIV"
Regedit prompts "Load Hive, Key Name:"
Type "WinPE" and press "Ok"
Now go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE:WinPE:ControlSet001:Control:Session Manager:Memory Management:"
Add a MultiStringValue (right mouse button, New:MultiStringValue)
You'll see a string named New Value #1
Select the string, right mouse button, modify.
Change the value data to:
drive:\file.extension minsize maxsize

For exapmle:
C:\pagefile.sys 0 128

Call the string "PagingFiles"
(select the string, right mouse button: "rename"

Close all the expanded key's on the left
Expand key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE"
Select key "WinPE"
Click on "File", select "Unload HIVE"
Close the registry and reboot.

Does anyone know the key i have to edit to start paging automaticly at the boot of PE?

The %SystemRoot%\System32\SETUPREG.HIV in the WinPE build is what gets turned into the SYSTEM registry hive. The tricky part is that the "PagingFiles" registry entry for the paging file has hardcoded drive letters (e.g. C:\PAGEFILE.SYS 100 400), which might make CD-based PE builds misbehave if they %systemdrive% isn't the same as this drive letter.

Or perhaps you could try to cover multiple bases by stuffing in a pagefile entry for many drive letters. The risk with this strategy is that if one of those drive letters matches a hard drive partition, you won't be able to nuke that partition from space since it has an open active system file on it.

-syrynxx

You can set up PE by using the WINBOM.INI to automatically create a pagefile of specified size. If you want you could also have it create the drives assuming it has access to them through the mass storage driver.

In your winbom.ini file you just place this command

[DiskConfig]
Disk1 = First.Config

[First.Config]
WipeDisk = Yes
size1 = 10000
FileSystem1 = NTFS
ForceFormat = Yes
PartitionType1 = Primary
QuickFormat1 = No
SetActive 1= Yes

[WinPE]
PageFileSize = 512