Lesson learned
Well this was an other evening of “lessons learned”
Tonight I installed the WinPE 2.0 source files on my RIS server.
Created the directory “X86_WinPE_SP2 on my server
Copied the I386 directory from the PE CD in this directory
Copied the templates directory from an existing SP2 RIS directory to the I386
Edit the *.sif file
Restart the RIS service
And that should be it….. Well not really.
The initial boot went well, but after the startnet.cmd kicked of factory.exe –winpe a dialog box was shown where I could select:” Turn off, reboot, shutdown, quit” (see the included file). The quit option removed the dialog and presented the cmd screen… “Well what the heck is this”, I thought….. After doing a lot of thinking and some experimenting I noticed that this was a winbom.ini setting (Restart=none), but it was not being recognized or located by the system. At that point I remembered the locations where winpe / factory looks for the file:
1. The path and file name specified by the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Factory\Winbom.
2. The root of all removable media drives that are not CD-ROM drives, such as a floppy disk drive.
3. The root of all CD-ROM drives.
4. The location of Factory.exe, usually the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Sysprep folder.
5. The root of %SYSTEMDRIVE%.
1. I didn’t chance this path so the file was’t located here.
2. I didn’t use a removable media source to store the winbom file.
3. I didn’t use a cd-rom, just plain old and simple ris ;-)
4. Factory is located in the system32 folder. Standard there is no winbom file present in this folder.
5. Same as answer 4
Well of course you, as a very smart reader, already must have located the problem by now. Factory could by no means find the winbom file and presented the dialog box because it wasn’t instructed not to do so.
The solution to the problem is really simple. Just move the winbom.ini file from the %systemroot% to the system32 folder. This way you can still use the –winpe parameter with factory and skip that **** annoying dialog screen.
I hope someone someone can make use of this knowledge.
Have fun
Michael Waterman