Win PE netsh wlan not connecting to wireless network

[forsberg94]

Hey everyone.

I was able to get the command line tool: netsh wlan working in Win PE 3.0 thanks to JFX's help in the following thread http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/152480-netsh-wlan-issues/

I am having a strange issue now though.

If I export a secured Access Point's profile in my instance of Windows 7 x64 Professional, It will not connect via the command line in Win PE (as shown in the following image)

WinPE netsh wlan screenshot

This Access Point has WPA2-Personal enabled.

If I change this Access Point to have no security, then the Win PE netsh wlan command can add and connect to this profile with no problem.

Also, If i export the above profile (with WPA2-Personal), using the following command: netsh wlan export profile ASsU_2.4 key=clear , Win PE can import this xml profile just fine and connect to it without any problems via the command line. This last command will export the profile to an XML file with a clear text password.

So WinPE netsh wlan is having trouble decrypting the passwords to use to connect to the AP.

Also, there is only one SSID associated with this profile, so adding that parameter to the connect command does nothing.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why this could be the case??

Any help is much appreciated!!

Thanks

- Chris

[forsberg94]

It seems this is a feature of the netsh wlan command. You can only import a salted password XML file into the same computer that it was exported from. Even though this is the same computer, since it is using a different OS (Win PE), it is thinking that it is not.

The only workaround that I can provide for this is the following:

netsh wlan export profile name="Test_AP" key=clear

this will result in the command generating an XML file with a clear-text password of the Wireless AP's security key.

Importing the profile with the clear-text XML file will work on any other computer.