Why I love and Hate WinPE 2.0

[p4ntb0y]

I have had so many issues with Winpe 2.0.....

Hates..

boots machines with 256mb of ram but cant create primary partition's unless at least 348mb of ram.

Has anyone gotten around this issue?

I have tried all versions of diskpart for this but still no go.

On vista compatible machines USB boots really quick, But the CD install is very slow.

on XP compatible machines the USB is slow and the CD is fast.

I still can't get my head around this one.

Multi function Nic Drivers I know you can use the Ris one but I would of thought by now there would be driver support for these devices.

I use alot of HP kit, The HP scripting toolkit tools do not work within WINPE 2.0 (Sets raids configs, hardware, bios etc)

Love...

Well its bloody useful and works great! just wish there was a bit more support.

I have not found alot on the Net about Plugins for WINPE 2.0 or customizations or tweaks.

Hopefully when Windows 2008 Server hits the shops in Nov all my problems will fade away.

If anyone knows about how to add better USB support for the XP compatiable machines and get round the Diskpart issue's let me know.

[bj-kaiser]

I have had so many issues with Winpe 2.0.....

On vista compatible machines USB boots really quick, But the CD install is very slow.

on XP compatible machines the USB is slow and the CD is fast.

...

This one is probably more of a hardware problem. I have read that even if you have a machine with USB 2.0 ports most of them only support USB 1.1 for booting (BIOS issues). Your newer vista capable hardware seems to be free of that problem.

[p4ntb0y]

Yep but...

both models dc7600 are the same hard ware but the sticker on the front is different one is vista compat the other xp Devcon outputs seem the same.

Its the diskpart one thats the most annoying one

[bj-kaiser]

Yep but...

both models dc7600 are the same hard ware but the sticker on the front is different one is vista compat the other xp Devcon outputs seem the same.

Its the diskpart one thats the most annoying one

if BIOS and hardware/mainboard revision are the same, it would be weird.

i think i have to try that diskpart thing, just that we dont have to much hardware with less than 512 MB anymore.

[bj-kaiser]

just a quick sidenote, i tried diskpart on a machine (mb: Asus A8V-MX, cpu: AMD Sempron 3000) with 256 MB RAM ... it was no problem to create a primary partion of 10 GB. Maybe you get problems if your RAM-disk is to big, mine is about 100MB.

edit:

duh, nevermind. I have overseen that the box had not 2x 256 MB but 2x 512.

Edited August 10, 2007 by bj-kaiser

[p4ntb0y]

Thanks for taking the time to test!

[trtkron]

For machines that I know only have 256, I just keep a handful of old 128-256MB flash drives around that I use to create pagefiles on. A VB script runs to check memory and stops a handful of services and then looks for the flash drive to create the page file, if it doesn't have it... produces a reminder to plug a drive in.

I couldn't find any other way around that 256 limit, some machines make it further then others, but all 256's eventually die during some point of the imaging process

[ChrisBaksa]

I have found absolutely no reason to move to WinPE 2.0.

WinnPE 2005 is rock solid and has driver support for everything I need.

With the scripted builder I wrote, I can build a WinPE 2005 image in about 90 seconds.

There is nothing in WinPe 2.0 that I can't do in WinPE 2005. (at least nothing that I have found that really matters to me)

In general... WinPE 2.0 seems to be more of a headache then it's worth.

My 2 cents.

Chris

[bj-kaiser]

i found the advantage of VistaPE/WinPE 2.0 for me is that MS finally made it possible to boot WinPE from nothing more than TFTP (and DHCP), read total netboot, without any need for MS services (BINL, anyone?). So WinPE got sort of platform-agnostic (serverwise), the boot server can run any OS, as long as it supplies DHCP and TFTP service. Together with the PXElinux bootloader you have a nice tool for recovery and installation tasks. (I know there is RIS/WDS, but sorry we are a bit novell addict here )