Hi,

My company is trying to see if we can't boot diagnostics and other software through pxe to eliminate the need of running around with usb keys and cds. The only problem is that wds (which we use to deploy winxp atm) only accepts .wim files. This also would give us a lot of freedom that we do not have (like pxeing a knoppix iso unto a machine with a corrupt harddrive).

Has anybody discovered a way to force on a iso file onto windows deployment service, or a way to covert a group of files (or an iso) into a 'valid windows boot image'? Does anybody have any ideas what files wds checks for to insure a valid boot image (and if we can fake that)?

Not to sure about wds but if you had legacy mode on, I have booted upto 16mb of tools in a dos environment and custom xp iso's through the old RIS menu's.

If your WDS server is running in 'Legacy' or 'Mixed' mode, thus still supporting RIS setup types, you can get it to boot PXElinux. And with that and memdisk (also part of the syslinux utilities) you can boot almost everything. (and the joke is,that also includes WinPE V2.0)

http://projectdream.org/wordpress/2007/04/...linux-from-ris/
http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

It's not the 'pure' and by MS intended way, but those who think out of the box, are sometimes wiser.

I use PXElinux and it just seems easier to me. I can have my floppy, PE 2.0, and PE 2005 boots all in one place with a simple menu to choose which image to boot. Just my 2 cents.

We actually moved from pxelinux. The reason why we moved to winPE was to remove the multiple things that could potentially break (as well as remove the maintence overhead). I tried bj-kaiser and gadget's method by using legacy RIS, and used risME to edit legacy RIS into getting a bartpe image to load. However, I get an Error: TFTP failed transferring image file after the blue client login screen.

you may want to use WireShark or another sniffer to trace down the reason for this. Probably there are just files missing or whatever. If there are logs of the TFTP-server they would probably help you, given the MS TFTP service produces usable logs. I for myself only use tftp-hpa and dnsmasq for pxebooting, never had the need for RIS/WDS.