Metzen

Not true. A smaller file size can help speed up PXE booting over a slow link. Sometimes I have to work with a link that takes ~30mins to boot WinPE over PXE. Any reduction is a huge boon! In addition, a smaller boot.sdi will kick off downloading the WIM faster as well.

Just change the registry key for wpeinit to cmd.exe. Copy procmon.exe to your WinPE image and launch procmon and set it to record registry and file monitoring. Then launch Wpeinit. That will usually point you to the culprit. I know with our HP servers it was really slow because of hardware enumeration. The amount of device ID's in the servers I was using just dwarfed your average desktop. I think it had some ~200 device ID's. This was a Proliant G5 370 (IIRC). If you install devcon.exe into your WinPE image you can verify that too.

Just make a script that does the following... Imagex.exe /mountrw %PATH_TO_YOUR_SOURCE% C:\mount %UPDATE_KB123456%.EXE /update C:\mount\$WIN_NT$.~LS Or just update the source and remake the WIM from a virtual machine. As always, you trade speed for complexity. You can use WinPE 2005 instead. Then you won't have to use bootsect.exe but this thread asked about PE2.1. You run winnt32.exe /switches, wait for it to finsih, then your back to your WinPE command-prompt. Now use ImageX.exe. Microsoft has actually been recommending it to be done like that since NT. The changes to this tech article is that instead of installing the drive into a another computer, we're taking an image of that drive and then applying that image to another computer. Just grab it out of the WinPE image. I believe that version works on XP. Or install the WAIK or the Windows OPK. They all contain ImageX among some other tools. You don't need to use ImageX. Ghost will work as well. The flexibility of being able to access the filesystem after applying with ImageX is nice though. We use a script that detects what type of machine you have and then it will copy over the appropriate OEMBIOS.BIN, OEMBIOS.SIG, OEMBIOS.CAT, etc. after applying the image. We also use a script before applying the ImageX that asks a series of questions (eg What role does this machine have? X,Y or Z?) then takes those answers and modifies the hard drive afterwards (ie, copies over certain programs and sets them to auto-install, changes the unattend.txt [which is actually WINNT.SIF at this stage] for certain computer names, copies over appropriate drivers for $OEM$, etc.). In this way, we actually modularize our install. We have the "base" which is kept pure, then a scripted layer for things that can't be auto-detected (ie, what role does the machine play?), and then add scripted layers on top which run silently. This allows us to completely image a machine in about ~15 minutes from WinPE boot to desktop. Naturally, this didn't occur overnight but took about 5 years of evolution starting with WinPE from XPSP1. Though, I think I could implement a solution that matches it in functionality in about a week if I had to start from scratch.

Use Winnt32 and "install" the OS onto the drive but don't reboot. Your harddisk should now be ready for text-mode setup so it's still hardware agnostic. Now using ImageX make an image of the drive back to the network. Now change your flow like so: 1 Initializes net 2 network share 3 creates partitions/formats/bootsector 4 run imagex and restore the image. If you wanted, what we would do is on step 3 we'd create two partitions, a 2GB one and one for the rest of the system. We'd copy the imagex image to the 2GB partition and expand it into the bigger partition. Then we'd use diskpart to delete the 2GB partition and expand the big partition to consume the smaller one. I think you need to re-bootsect after doing so. This would make installs lickty split quick as copying over a single large file over a network is consistently faster than lots of individual files. And copying to a HDD and expanding from there is even faster than trying to expand over the network (which is essentially reading a bunch of small files). The advantage of the imagex image is you can mount the image and manipulate files without having to rebuild the whole thing from PE + winnt32. Adding additional drivers to $OEM$, editing the TXTSETUP.SIF files became a piece of cake.