Ashinator

Can you open up the device manager on your VMware guest and tell me what the hard drive controller is? The other way to check is to open the settings of your VMware guest and click on hard drive and it should say whether it's IDE or SCSI. I think you maybe using a SCSI hard drive which isn't supported in the vanilla WinPE/WDS images.

Hi akajester, What you can do is open up a command prompt when you boot into WinPE and see if you can browse the C:\ drive and confirm it is the correct drive. The other thing you could do is open diskpart in the command prompt and then type list disk which will bring up a list of disks. If your drive is listed type in select disk 0 (the number which corelates with your disk) then type list partition and your system partition should be listed. For help with the diskpart commands try this link. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415. If your disk is not showing up I am guessing that you will need to inject a mass storage driver into WinPE. I know the Intel SATA drives you need to do this for especially with laptops. You should be able to find out how to do it in my guide at http://ashleystechblog.blogspot.com/2009/0...t-services.html. Try steos 39 to 41. You will need to place your driver files in their before you do those steps tho. You may need to go back a few steps depending on how you did yours. Anyway let me know how you go.

Hi Panosarp, In my Setting up Windows Deployment Services for WIM image based network deployment of Windows XP on Windows Server 2003 post. Have a look at this post http://www.midteq.co.uk/index.php?option=c...8&Itemid=68 it should be able to help you. Basically you have to hack the boot image for WDS so that it will force detect all booted PC with the same HAL and there for show all images. I had a similar problem and I'm pretty sure this is what fixed it. You can see how I did it in my guide in my Setting up Windows Deployment Services for WIM image based network deployment of Windows XP on Windows Server 2003 post at step 78 to step 84.

Hi Rich_Weiss, I believe you maybe refering to someone elses tutorial. If you do have any questions or need any help just let me know.

Are you using the /boot argument when capturing your WIM image. Such as the following command. imagex /boot /compress max /capture c:\ c:\WIM_Image.wim "My WIM Image". You can also try using EasyBCD to create the boot image after you have deployed the image manually. http://neosmart.net/

I've used it before for XP for scripted installs from DVD which worked really well. I would boot into the DVD then select the settings and what software I wanted installed and then I could walk away and come back in an hour and it would be done. I was able to get it working over the network via WDS aswell which made updating and deploying it much easier. I still prefer to use WDS images deployed via pxe booting tho.

It will most likely be caused by the HAL. WDS will be booting with your HAL set to whatever it detects and if your images don't have the same HAL it will not display them. If you go to step 78 of my how to guide on my blog. http://ashleystechblog.blogspot.com/2009/0...t-services.html that should fix it for you. I've also got a thead on here about my at http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=130866. If that doesn't fix it let me know.

In regards to changing the HAL. The way i did it was to install it onto a VM with one CPU. I used MySysprep http://www.tsaysoft.com/mysysprep/. I use MySysprep to Sysprep the PC before reboot and capturing/making an image. When it boots up MySysprep runs instead of normal Sysprep which changes HAL and installs the drivers before booting into Windows. I have not had any issues with regards to changing the HAL with MySysprep. I have had issues with having faulty drivers so you need to constantly remove faulty drivers and replace them as you encounter problems. I have found Mass Storage Drivers to be the biggest problem which results in the 0x00000007B blue screen. I have also had alot of issues gettin bluetooth drivers to work. I can say that I have been able to use this method to deploy one image to multiple hardware setups with all drivers installed ready to boot via network and dvd. It requires alot of time, persistance and patience to create but hopefully using my guides it will simplify and streamline the process alot. Let me know if you have any more questions.

Yes, It is possible to deploy .WIM images via CD/DVD. I used the same WIM image and just hacked a lil automation into a Win PE (Preinstallation Environment) DVD and added the .WIM image to the DVD. I will see if I have find my old work files and I will post what I find here. The steps were something like this tho. call diskpart.bat which used diskpart to format and create 20gb partition on the first hardrive and then create a partition for the rest of the drive. call winpe.bat which basically used imagex to expand the image onto the drive call reboot.bat which basically rebooted the computer and then it would boot into the sysprepped image we just deployed onto the hard drive.

Hi Guys, I just wanted to let you guys know that I have posted 2 howto guides on my blog to share with yas. The first is "How to create a hardware independent sysprepped WIM image of Windows XP for deployment from Windows Deployment Services" and the second being "Setting up Windows Deployment Services for WIM image based network deployment of Windows XP on Windows Server 2003". I have learnt alot from these forums throughout many years of experimenting and working on optimsing a good way to deploy Windows XP. Anyway my blog address is http://ashleystechblog.blogspot.com/ so let me know what you think. I have them availible in word documents also in case you guys want to use/update them yourselves.