[Tripredacus]

I'd like to make a note regarding all the talk about the progress bar.

I recently updated my PE image using the new servicing tools provided in the new OPK version. I am sure it made other changes, but one stood out. When you are upping or dropping an image now, instead of it updating the % and time remaining on a single line, it now draws a new line with the new % in 1% increments! This might make it easier to make the progress bar work? IDK but it sounds like a start.

If you were to use, say autoit, we know it can read stuff of the screen (like how people use it to make bots for games), but is this possible:

1. Press enter to start imaging drive C
2. gImageX does not suppress the cmd prompt it is running the command from, but puts it behind the HTA (window) layer.
3. The script read line info from the cmd prompt behind GImageX.
4. The progressbar determines how to display based on info received from script.

Obviously I am partly mixing up its screen reading functionality with its other features... I think, while I am on the subject, I will contact our rep to see if the PE puts that progress info into a memory location that can be read.

[Tripredacus]

I have been experiencing intermittant issues with the progress bar itself. I know it doesn't "work" but when it is on the screen, you get a long gray rectangle, which is helpful because you know when it is imaging, or when its waiting for you to start it. Here are the different things I have seen concerning it, and the last one is a problem.

1 - regular long rectangular bar covering 75 (or 80) % of the screen
2 - regular length but only a couple pixels in height
3 - regular length but 3-4x regular height
4 - not appearing at all

I am wondering what can cause this. Its not resolution, as I've had 1, 2 and 4 happen at the same time on a bunch of same model notebooks. #3 was experienced on one PC in a group of 12 with the same CFG.

[SoultakerPT]

Hello and greetings from Portugal,

I was trying to use this HTA but when I launch it: mshta imagex.hta no application is launched. When I see task manager mshta is running but I don't see anything.

Can someone please help me?


Best Regards,
Soultaker

[Tripredacus]

This is meant to be run from a WinPE environment, not your OS. This can be very dangerous to run from your OS! Unless you got Task Manager to appear in the WinPE.

[SoultakerPT]

Tripredacus, on Jan 15 2009, 10:05 AM, said:

This is meant to be run from a WinPE environment, not your OS. This can be very dangerous to run from your OS! Unless you got Task Manager to appear in the WinPE.

Hi Tripredacus:

I'm using WinPE and I've launched Task Manager through taskmgr command-line. But now everything is working. Don't know why but the problem is no longe happening. I'm launching without the mshta.exe before, and it's running!

Excelent job this HTA.

[Tripredacus]

I like it very much also.

I have made 2 different backgrounds for it also, if anyone wants to use them, feel free.

Attached File(s)

•  pe.jpg (20.07K)
  Number of downloads: 45
•  pe1.jpg (90.8K)
  Number of downloads: 36

[SoultakerPT]

Nice Tripredacus. Very nice indeed! I would like to do some new ones too.

[SoultakerPT]

Again...

Funtastic work this one!

Just a good add-on would be a progress bar!

[Tripredacus]

SoultakerPT, on Jan 19 2009, 05:12 AM, said:

Again...

Funtastic work this one!

Just a good add-on would be a progress bar!

There is a progress bar but it does not work properly. It usually appears as a gray box that varies in size. Not sure why it varies. Some time it does not appear at all. I tried to fix it on my test server, but it resulted in it not opening the HTA at all so I gave up on it.

[SoultakerPT]

strange thing...

I've notice that when clicking on Map Network Drive the dialog box gets on top of the HTA and I cannot move it down again. I've tested this on a VM so I don't know if that's a problem with the VM.

Again, Keep Up the Good Work!

[Tripredacus]

I do not use that button. I replaced that function with my own drive mapping program. I use it only as a last resort as the startnet.cmd is supposed to do the drive mappings before the HTA is even loaded.

[SoultakerPT]

understood!

[surrealpro]

i would like to say thank you very much for an outstanding solution for a gui to imagex. i have a few questions that have been brought up in a few past posts but not sure if ever answered.

a. i would like to use the map drive option, but the pop screen does end up out of screen with no way to move it.

b. this one is more important but i use nothing but winxp images and would like to incorporate the bootsect command into this proceeds to make it fully unattended or work within our environment. any code or help with this would be greatly appreciated.

c. is there still an option or way to remove the new none working progessbar, and show the ugly command prompt window? at this time it looks as if it has just hung.

thank you everyone for your help.

d@ve

[geezery]

Hello all,

I have not been here reading for very long time. I have made very much changes for the version that is currently downloadable to the public. I have reverted back to the ImageX.exe usage for some functions, because I have found some problems when using the gimagexcom ActiveX. It is still in the package, but I'm only using it for some functions.

If someone is interested testing it I can give the link, just put an email to the address that is found from the first post.

Here is some things that are changed:

* Cleaned up the code a lot
* Added the "bootsect.exe /nt52 C: /force" command after the image has been applied. (I'm also using this for Windows XP deployment only) This can be easily changed to /nt60 if you are applying Vista images.
* Fixed the bug in the Map network window going out of the range
* Changed the (Apply,Capture & Append) functions to use the imagex.exe instead of the gimagex com
* Added a Delete function (Can delete entries from imagelist)

etc....

geezery

[chew118]

thanks for all the hard work. I send you my email for the link...

[surrealpro]

email sent, thank you so much...

d@ve

[Tripredacus]

I'd like to try it out I suppose. I've made so many changes to the current version that it wouldn't be worth it to update to the newer version.

Hope you don't mind I've been kinda advertising this thread in my sig. I did it more so I would be able to find it if I needed it.

[geezery]

I have sent the link to all of those who have sent me email.

Tripredacus ->

Can you tell me more about your modifications?

Sounds very interesting.

[Tripredacus]

I have done the following:

Changed the background pic. You can see this a couple pages back, I uploaded them.

Changed some functions for the buttons at the bottom. Removed Map Network drive, capture image, append image. I changed these to launch my own applications, one that Maps 2 network drives at once, kills mshta and relaunches the HTA again. I couldn't automate the reload button. I also have it launch programs to preinstall applications for Vista and XP. I have other things I'm going to change in the future that I haven't gotten to yet:

- change the prompt after imaging complete to restart instead of shut down, and also have option for Restart or install programs instead of cancel.

you seemed to have given up. I need another feature which I was going to do myself. When the DISKPART menu comes up (besides the complaint that I can't use the keyboard on that screen) I need another option. I come across some systems (notebooks) that have media drives that the WinPE makes the C drive, so the script doesn't work automatically because it can't assign Disk 0 a drive letter (its already taken). So I have to manually go into diskpart and reassign vol 1 drive letter to another letter before I can format the drive to C and start the image.

So.... FEATURE REQUEST: add another radio button to the Diskpart pop-up that says "use custom diskpart.txt" file. You click that, browse to the file, select it and click proceed. So that way I can have a custom text file to do diskpart if I have to do one of those notebooks.

I'm in a flux right now (business stuff) with imagex so I'm not sure what my future with it will be.

[KenKightly]

I have gotten a lot of use out of this script, and modified it heavily for my own use.
I really appreciate the work that’s been done here.

On that note, I would like to contribute to this group.

I have seen several posts where people have had issues using USB drives due to the nature of there dynamic allocation of a drive letter.

I have a script that will find the drive letter of your USB drive, and change it to the drive letter of your choice. I have created this so I can run this script from my USB drive with the drive letter assign as Z:.

There are a couple of prerequisites that need to be followed first. They have to do with the setup of the USB drive initially.

My USB drive has 2 partitions. The first partition is a 1GB partition that holds the boot files for WinPE. The second partition holds the script and image files, and is 460GB.

The 1st partition should be formatted as Fat32, and should be setup to boot your WinPE.
The following article is a good one for this. (hint look for creating a UFD boot disk)
http://technet.micro...y/cc709665.aspx

Once you have the WinPE boot created, format the second partition using NTFS, and label the volume IMAGE This is important because the script looks for this drive by its volume label and gets the drive letter.

The attached zip file contains 4 files.
startnet.bat (this is an example and should not be coppied to your winpe windows\system32 dir.)
getUSBLetter.bat (copy this to your WinPE windows\system32 directory)
chgletter.txt (copy this to your WinPE windows\system32 directory)
image.bat (copy this to your WinPE windows\system32 directory)

What are the scripts doing.

The first script is getUSBLetter.bat.

This script uses a filesystem object to look at all “hard disks” on your system, then find the volume with the label of “IMAGE” it also sets the drive letter in the variable USB, which can be used in scripts.

The second task of the script is to change the drive letter that it finds using diskpart. In my case I have a chgletter.txt file that I pass to diskpart that changes the %USB% to Z

The third part of the script is basically the same as the first, and queries the drive again and resets the variable USB to the new drive letter.

At the end of this bat file it calls image.bat file that will cd to the drive letter %USB% and starts the wizard.hta.

I am sure there are better ways to achieve this, but this works well for me, and I haven’t seen any post here to help those users who are looking for a solution.

I hope this is useful.

Ken.
 getusbletter.zip (958bytes)
Number of downloads: 51