duomenox

Hello, I used WPIW a long, long time ago for making restore CDs for my family... I came back to revisit it and it has really evolved. I was looking at the command to download a file, I'm unsure as to the best way to do this. I would like to download a file then install it. The download link is a php script that pulls the latest version of the file off the server (ie https://domain.com/latestfile.php) Is this possible, or do I need to download a static file? Either way, how can I choose to download it then run it... especially if I don't know the exact name since the name includes the version number and is subject to change? Kel, I also need to know how commercial licensing works. I'm looking at using the product at work for deployments and want to make sure I do it the right way. I sent you a little something via Paypal as a thank you for the software, the time you put into it, and you continued support of the project. Thank you.

A WIM can most definitely be used to backup and restore a system. This is the primary restore method we use for deploying our customized gold images to terminals. WIMs are very versatile, have many deployment options, and can be maintained offline... just to name a few advantages. The WIM capture process does not affect activation in any way, when booting into Windows, the OS will verify activation information... information from various hardware components will be used to verify validity of the activation. Some items queried are: parts of the BIOS, MAC address of the first network adapter found, and information from the firmware of the HD (that is not a complete list of items, just a few). There is a threshold that Windows has for changes to the core hardware... if only a MAC changes then you typically don't need to re-activate... if a mainboard changes and the BIOS information does not match, then you most likely will need to reactivate the product. If you are applying the WIM to different hardware, then it is possible that this threshold is being broken and that is why the issue with WGA is appearing. A few questions about your setup... Are you applying the WIM to a different set of hardware than it was created on? Do you standardize your Hardware with a particular vendor... Dell. HP, etc... ? Are there any massstorage driver changes between the WIM creation system and the WIM deployment system? Are any of the systems (source or destination) you are using setup as a RAID array? We use only Dell and NCR hardware in our organization so we don't have to worry about activation as the SLP keys and the BIOS licenses take care of that for us. But moving WIMs between VMs and physical machines caused a small setback. We got around it by using SysPrep with a custom answer file and without the Generalize option. This allowed us to reactivate the software but not change the configuration of the image as we moved them between physical and virtual machines. Another idea would be to service the WIM offline using DISM and inject the latest massstorage drivers for the machine you are deploying to. I had some issue with the DELL PERC S100 drivers that caused machines to blue-screen after restored using a WIM when the destination was a RAID 1 array. Dell resolved it in a driver update and it has worked great since. Have you checked out Windows 7 driverpacks from driverpacks.net? I use those on WIMs that will need to support a wide variety of hardware. I inject the entire set of massstorage and LAN driverpacks which allow me to deploy to almost any hardware platform. The last option I can think of right now is a Sysprep with a generalize and a custom answerfile with your key and the settings to rearm the activation period. This would be done before the WIM was taken... one nice thing about this process is that you can use the copy profile setting to make all the custom settings configured on the profile that run Sysprep the default profile in the deployed image. Then whenever you deploy the image you can enter audit mode at the username prompt by hitting CTRL + SHIFT + F3. This will allow you to deploy the WIM, make your needed changes in audit mode, reboot and pull a new WIM, then automatically enter the deployment screen after deployment. Windows will not re-arm the activation until the oobe has executed so you can audit the image many, many times without the worry of having to rearm each time. I hope some of those ideas help.

Woohoo... I know the answer to this problem! Sorry, I have gailned tons, and tons of knowledge from this forum and it is nice to be able to give back :-P Your problem is the BCD store you are restoring does not understand what is on the drive, this happens 100% of the time when I restore a WIM to a new drive. I'm going to start at the beginning, I apologize if I go over things that you already know. Assuming you boot into WinPE, are using Diskpart to configure your partitions, and the disk you are applying the image to is Disk 0 use the following diskpart commands to prepare the drive: (Please Note, I am creating two partitions, the first one is the "system recovery" partition that Win7 makes during a normal install, the second is the OS partition. If you don't have an OS partition just omit the SIZE parameter from the partition creation command and ignore the creation of the second partition.) diskpart select disk 0 clean create partition primary align=2048 size=100 active format fs=ntfs quick assign letter=c create partition primary format fs=ntfs quick assign letter=d exit The commands will clean the drive (BEWARE this will destroy all data on the drive), create the 100 MB System Restore Partition (increase the size if you like, I use a 10 GB partition and store a restore WIM on it myself) make the parition bootable, format it as NTFS and assign a letter to it. It will also assign the remaning space to a second partition and assign it to drive letter D. At this point, you need to restore your WIM. WIM files are not "system images" they are an image of the files, file structure, and the permissions associated with them. This is important as it allows you to restore to drives smaller than the origional, but also means you have additional maintenence to complete after restoring an image. Assuming the system restore image was restored to the C drive, and the OS was restored to the D drive we need to edit the BCD store to tell the booloader how to load the OS. The BCD store is located on the C drive... the system restore partition. To enumerate the BCD store on the C drive you will need to use the following command: bcdedit /store C:\Boot\BCD This will give you a display of the BCD store as it sits currently. It is in a broken state, we need to repaire two entries, the device and osdevice. We will be pointing both the device and osdevice to the D dive if the system restore partition was restored, if there is only one partition on the drive change the following commands to point ot C: bcdedit /store C:\boot\bcd /set {default} device partition=D: bcdedit /store C:\boot\bcd /set {default} osdevice partition=D: The BCD will now know to run winload from the D drive (D is relational to the partiion order the BCD and bootloader sees, not what is displayed in Windows). You should be able to reboot and load up Windows :-) You can use the bootrec command to scan for the os and automatically rebuild the BCD store... you will have to do this if you did not get the BCD store in the intial WIM creation (unless you want to build it from scratch, line by line). The problem with bootrec is that it is hard to script properly, the two lines above are easy to scritpt and have served me very well. I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any quesitons. I will try to get back in a timely fashion.