WDS and WinPE - Network Drivers 1

[Stevehewitt]

Hi guys,

Trying to get an automated installation of Vista working via WDS on a Win2k8 Ent SP2 box.

Can boot into WDS fine and can fire up a capture image OK too. (And upload an sysprep'd box to WDS).

However if I upload boot.wim from a Vista SP1 DVD to WDS and boot into that image I get an error that it doesn't have drivers for the network card being used.

As such I've ran imagex /apply onto the boot.wim from the Vista DVD and then ran peimg /inf and added the relevant network drivers. All good. Imagex /capture worked and I uploaded the boot.wim back to WDS (now with drivers). However WDS says it's not a valid boot image so I can't add it.

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong here?

Cheers,



Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[LWComputingMVP]

If I remember correctly, you need to add the /boot on the imagex command line when building the boot.wim...

That said, I'd suggest using the boot.wim from a Windows 7 release candidate.

-Lee

Those who ask why, learn

http://www.lwcomputing.com

 

[Stevehewitt]

Thanks Lee - I'll give it a try!

Good idea about the Win7 RC, though as I'm only customising it with drivers I'll leave it till it's RTM'd then tweak it. Once I get the process sorted it shouldn't take 10 minutes to sort it out and get it added to WDS.

Thanks again,


Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[Stevehewitt]

Hi Lee,

Good news and bad news.... the /boot switch worked fine - thank you!

However I'm getting the following error after booting into the Vista setup WinPE (boot.wim taken from Vista media):

Windows PE cannot start because the actual SYSTEMROOT directory(X:\Windows) is different from the configured one (x:\Windows~BT\Windows). This can be configured with the peimg /targetpath command. Please consult the documentation for more details. Press the OK button or close this message to reboot.[/quote]

From doing some research this is because I shouldn't be using a customised boot.wim from the Vista media but instead should be using the boot.wim from the WAIK...

This is cool, and I'm happy to do so - but my problem is that if I use the WAIK boot.wim then it loads up a command prompt at the WinPE boot rather than executing Windows Setup...


So my question is now if I use the WinPE environment from WAIK 1.1, how do I get a boot image to automatically deploy a Vista image hosted on the WDS server the WinPE environemnt was booted from...?

Hope this makes sense!

Cheers,


Steve.

[i]"They have the internet on computers now!"[/i] - Homer Simpson

 

[SimonDavies]

Would this not be a good time to start looking at MDT2008? It's a free download from MS and this would allow you to create Task Sequence for the deployment without too much of an issue (going as far as formatting the disk, installing additional software etc).

Simon

The real world is not about exam scores, it's about ability.