[fizban2]

yay for updates, can /prep the build folder fine now, has anyone gotten and applications loaded successfully yet?

[Skinner]

likuidkewl, on Feb 28 2006, 06:12 AM, said:

WAIK is now available at the Connect website, it is huge 1,242MB.

I cannot find WAIK at the Connect website. Where can I find it please?

[sammycat]

Skinner, on Mar 7 2006, 01:02 AM, said:

likuidkewl, on Feb 28 2006, 06:12 AM, said:

WAIK is now available at the Connect website, it is huge 1,242MB.

I cannot find WAIK at the Connect website. Where can I find it please?

Has anyone built a WinPE 2.0 bootable CD yet? I notice the big CAB file in the WAIK image but never found out how to make that into a bootable image/CD. If anyone had any success please share with the group. Thanks.

[Vagabond8]

Sure. There are a few wims inside tha cab. I built my pe cd from there for i386 architecture and the procedure described in the docs sort of worked. Except for some missing device drivers as always.

So.. read the docs.. it's all there. Step by step.

[sammycat]

Vagabond8, on Mar 14 2006, 01:52 AM, said:

Sure. There are a few wims inside tha cab. I built my pe cd from there for i386 architecture and the procedure described in the docs sort of worked. Except for some missing device drivers as always.

So.. read the docs.. it's all there. Step by step.

Thanks. I found the procedure you were talking about and mad ethe first bootable CD. However, it would not get past the winloader.exe stage. I used the boot.wim file from the VISTA DVD. I think other people ran into the same problem too. How did you create your bootable CD? Please let me know. Thanks.

[fizban2]

followed the same instructions that you did, from teh help file, i copied the boot.wim to my working folder and tehn applied to to the build folder, added the files that i needed and installed the packages witht peimg, the /prepped the folder, at that point i compressed it back to a wim and it worked fine, i got the error that you were speaking of the first time, recopied my files from the windows AIK folder to the directory i was working with, reran through the steps and it worked the second time, i will try it again and see if i can recreate the error

[Albuquerque]

Sammy,

While he said it a bit quickly, Fizban has the answer. The problem is the last step of the Windows PE help file tells you to perform an XIMAGE /Export on the WIM file you created. Don't do that, because you lose it's bootable format. Just copy it straight into your Sources folder rather than doing the export.

That'll fix your Winload issue.

[fizban2]

thanks for explaining better yesterday was insane and i did have a lot of time to post anything longer..... crazy end users.....

[sammycat]

Albuquerque, on Mar 15 2006, 11:37 AM, said:

Sammy,

While he said it a bit quickly, Fizban has the answer. The problem is the last step of the Windows PE help file tells you to perform an XIMAGE /Export on the WIM file you created. Don't do that, because you lose it's bootable format. Just copy it straight into your Sources folder rather than doing the export.

That'll fix your Winload issue.

Alright! Thanks for your help. I will try it first thing in the morning.

How far did everyone get with WDS?

[fizban2]

Fully setup WDS pretty nice


http://www.msfn.org/...showtopic=69580

whole post on it here

[sammycat]

Albuquerque, on Mar 15 2006, 11:37 AM, said:

Sammy,

While he said it a bit quickly, Fizban has the answer. The problem is the last step of the Windows PE help file tells you to perform an XIMAGE /Export on the WIM file you created. Don't do that, because you lose it's bootable format. Just copy it straight into your Sources folder rather than doing the export.

That'll fix your Winload issue.

I appreciate your help. However, I am still getting the winloader.exe error after copying the file directly from the original directory. The file I used was: F1_WinPE.wim. The steps I followed are below: (I did not use the ximage /expport command). Should I have used a different WIM file? Thanks.

Step 1: Setup a Windows PE Build EnvironmentOpen a command prompt window.


Create a local Windows PE build directory, for example:

mkdir winpe\boot

mkdir winpe\sources

The \winpe directory will be used for creating an .iso image.


Step 2: Create an .iso imageCopy boot files from Microsoft Vista OPK CD or Windows PE CD to local build location. Create an .iso using oscdimg tool. For example:

copy \\<CD path location>\bootmgr C:\winpe

xcopy /cherky \\<CD path location>\boot C:\winpe\boot

ximage /export /compress max C:\winpebuild\boot.wim 1 c:\winpe\sources\boot.wim

oscdimg -n -b\\<CD path location>\etfsboot.com c:\winpe c:\winpe.iso

[Albuquerque]

I actually didn't follow those directions; I went the way of creating a "customized" PE image. I'm positive you're somehow not getting the WIM into bootable format with the commands they have you follow, so I suggest doing this instead:

Make a C:\winpebuild\build directory
Make sure you have a directory named C:\Winpe, with subfolders Sources\ and Boot\
Make sure bootmgr is in C:\Winpe
Make sure the contents of the C:\Winpe\Boot folder match that of your bootable Vista CD

Then do the two items below:

ximage /apply C:\winpebuild\winpe.wim 1 C:\winpebuild\build (do NOT use boot.wim, use Winpe.wim)

ximage /capture C:\winpebuild\build C:\Winpe\Sources\boot.wim "Description" /boot /compress max

You'll now have a bootable boot.wim stored in the C:\winpe\Sources folder. Basically you can now do the OSCDIMG like you did before:

oscdimg -n -b\\<CD path location>\etfsboot.com c:\winpe c:\winpe.iso

[sammycat]

Albuquerque, on Mar 20 2006, 12:43 PM, said:

I actually didn't follow those directions; I went the way of creating a "customized" PE image. I'm positive you're somehow not getting the WIM into bootable format with the commands they have you follow, so I suggest doing this instead:

Make a C:\winpebuild\build directory
Make sure you have a directory named C:\Winpe, with subfolders Sources\ and Boot\
Make sure bootmgr is in C:\Winpe
Make sure the contents of the C:\Winpe\Boot folder match that of your bootable Vista CD

Then do the two items below:

ximage /apply C:\winpebuild\winpe.wim 1 C:\winpebuild\build (do NOT use boot.wim, use Winpe.wim)

ximage /capture C:\winpebuild\build C:\Winpe\Sources\boot.wim "Description" /boot /compress max

You'll now have a bootable boot.wim stored in the C:\winpe\Sources folder. Basically you can now do the OSCDIMG like you did before:

oscdimg -n -b\\<CD path location>\etfsboot.com c:\winpe c:\winpe.iso

I got it working. The part i didn't do from day 1 is ximage /apply. Where did you get your winpe.wim image file? I actually used boot.wim and got it working. I am now in the command prompt. I need to do more research on what I can do next . I have WDS set up and I am goign to see if I can ghost that machine up as a WIM image file. Right now it has the Windows XP SP2 base image. If you have any insights on this please let me know. Thank you so much for the help.

Sammycat

[Albuquerque]

I was able to put XIMAGE on my PE 2005 image and then make WIM images of my various software platforms. Worked like a champ, although it's still considerably slower than Ghost32 (but compresses far better than Ghost does)

[fizban2]

not to mention the benefit of only having one WIM instead of 3 or 4 ghost images

[Albuquerque]

fizban2, on Mar 20 2006, 04:55 PM, said:

not to mention the benefit of only having one WIM instead of 3 or 4 ghost images

Definitely an advantage there. One thing I do miss is Ghost's multicast ability -- being able to image 100 machines simultaneously with essentially no speed loss is a nice thing to have.

[getwired]

Albuquerque, on Mar 20 2006, 02:31 PM, said:

I was able to put XIMAGE on my PE 2005 image and then make WIM images of my various software platforms. Worked like a champ, although it's still considerably slower than Ghost32 (but compresses far better than Ghost does)

If you disable the compression, you should generally find that it can keep up with, if not exceed, the speed of Ghost (or PQDI - which Ghost is now based upon). It's apples to oranges to compare a WIM doing compression with a Ghost or PQDI image that is simply picking up sectors (and yes, throwing out the blank ones, as PQDI can do).

[fizban2]

Quote

Definitely an advantage there. One thing I do miss is Ghost's multicast ability -- being able to image 100 machines simultaneously with essentially no speed loss is a nice thing to have.

just get WDS setup for an unattended install, not as efficent as multicast, but it is still better then nothing

[Albuquerque]

fizban2, on Mar 21 2006, 12:42 PM, said:

just get WDS setup for an unattended install, not as efficent as multicast, but it is still better then nothing

Not sure if WDS would make up for the speed gain of multicasting a single sysprepped image to 100 machines simultaneously. That's two hundred gigabytes of data transfer (in simplistic terms) that must be moved one way or another, and WDS just isn't going to move it that much faster in my opinion.

XIMAGE still definitely has uses, especially in an upgrade methodology. Just not sure it's going to replace Ghost anytime soon for massive deployment of brand new machines. (We lease refreshed over a thousand machines this quarter; there's probably 50 machines at any given time being imaged in our implementation department)

Edited because I can't do math

This post has been edited by Albuquerque: 21 March 2006 - 12:40 PM

[fizban2]

Quote

Not sure if WDS would make up for the speed gain of multicasting a single sysprepped image to 100 machines simultaneously. That's two hundred gigabytes of data transfer (in simplistic terms) that must be moved one way or another, and WDS just isn't going to move it that much faster in my opinion.

oh i agree that WDS probably won't replace ghost mulitcast for large scale imagings, but on a smaller scale it will work very well. sadly i don't have more then a couple machine availble in the lab for testing so i can't being to even test to speed and such with WDS but hopefully soon. I am curious to see how it does with 10 or so machines are pulling images down.