WinPE Help

[iisjman07]

I'm creating a winpe boot cd/usb for repairing computers that come in the shop. I've created a totally blank .wim file just for testing, which worked perfectly, but I need some help customizing it. I'd like to be able to load an application at startup (I wanna load nu2menu as a menu), and ideally I'd like to brand the wallpaper. Does anyone know how to do this or know where I can find any tutorials to do so?

 

[PcTek9]

Hey did you read the documentation?

Please don't sense any tone, I'm just saying when I did this, there was a bunch of info in the documentation. It was a lot of reading but definitely explains everything.

 

[iisjman07]

The only thing I've read is this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709665%28WS.10%29.aspx, which explained how to make the winpe image....

 

[dbdawn]

Check these links out.

http://blog.brianleejackson.com/winpe-3-0-boot-environment-scripts

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=21883&st=35

 

[Corbin]

Why not use BartPE I find it to be so much more easy to load my tools onto and customize, I keep it simple black and white, looks more difficult when clients see it. And there's a ton of support for how to tweak it. Iv never got to WinPE so ill admit its a hopeless tool for me at the moment tell I see it beat what I use now.p

 

[ComputerClinic]

I made my WinPE CD a number of months ago so I'm a lil rusty (I actually don't remember much; I'd have to teach myself again). But I was able to start a number of programs at startup, and also make a custom interface with GeoShell. There's a lot of good info here. It's hard to find what you want, but its a great reference if you do some digging. I think what you're looking for specifically is here. Do a google search for Winpeshl.ini for even more info.

 

[ComputerClinic]

For the background, just replace Windows\system32\winpe.bmp with your own picture. Its hard to find a good tutorial on custom WinPE CDs. I think when I get the time to update mine, I'll document it and make one.

 

[vdub12]

Why not just build a custom UBCD4WIN.

Its easy to customize and comes with all the tools you would ever need. I spent an afternoon about a month ago re-branding it and it came out great.

I changed all the references in the OS to UBCD4WIN to my business name and I built a custom boot splash and background. I also changed the bootloader. Its not a hard processes and with a little time building you can make a very custom boot CD. Just make sure the final size is less then 700Mb.

 

[iisjman07]

The reason I don't build a custom bartpe or ubcd4win is because they're based off xp, which is pushing on ten years old now. A winpe 2.0 (vista based) or winpe 3.0 (win7 based) has (in my experience) much better hardware support and loads faster.

Thanks everyone for the information, I'll read through it now...

 

[vdub12]

The reason I don't build a custom bartpe or ubcd4win is because they're based off xp, which is pushing on ten years old now. A winpe 2.0 (vista based) or winpe 3.0 (win7 based) has (in my experience) much better hardware support and loads faster.

Thanks everyone for the information, I'll read through it now...

The biggest problem is that 90% of the computers that I and most people support are still Window XP. If you try and use a Vista based boot disk you might have performance problems with 90% of your customers. Imagine booting a Vista based disk on a system that uses a P4 2.0Ghz CPU with 512Mb of ram. All you really need is something that looks professional and a custom UBC4WIN disk does that. You can change the theme and the backgrounds and make a disk thats branded to your business. The customer does not know the difference and an XP based boot disk in my opinion will run allot faster. I think if you try and boot an older computer with a modern OS based boot disk you are just setting yourself up for embarrassment in front of a client. Your better off using an older OS and looking like the professional hero. And between you and me an XP based boot disk is capable of running the same stuff a vista based boot disk is capable of.

 

[ComputerClinic]

In my experience (at least with my CD) WinPE loads and runs much faster than UBCD4Win, even on older machines. The reason is because the entire CD is loaded into RAM. I set it up to auto eject once its done loading. There are ways around this but I choose to use just a few tools (about 15) on my CD because I never use 90% of whats on UBCD4Win anyways. It will work just fine on machines with as little as 384MB of RAM.

In fact, unless you add your own shell, you get a command line. Maybe if you made a WinPE CD that is as feature rich as UBCD4Win it would load and run slower, but why do that? I don't need network support, or most of everything else that's on UBCD4Win.

I'm not saying you can't slim down UBCD4Win. I'm saying that WinPE isn't necessarily slow depending on how you build your CD.

 

[dbdawn]

Why not just build a custom UBCD4WIN
snip.....

UBCD4WIN is so slow compared to winpe.

In my experience (at least with my CD) WinPE loads and runs much faster than UBCD4Win, even on older machines. The reason is because the entire CD is loaded into RAM. I set it up to auto eject once its done loading. There are ways around this but I choose to use just a few tools (about 15) on my CD because I never use 90% of whats on UBCD4Win anyways. It will work just fine on machines with as little as 384MB of RAM.

In fact, unless you add your own shell, you get a command line. Maybe if you made a WinPE CD that is as feature rich as UBCD4Win it would load and run slower, but why do that? I don't need network support, or most of everything else that's on UBCD4Win.

I'm not saying you can't slim down UBCD4Win. I'm saying that WinPE isn't necessarily slow depending on how you build your CD.

Agree it depends on how you build you CD, the more data you put, the longer it takes to load in ram. I don't have a shell, only use the command line. I can launch a 3rd party shell if I need to. I have less than 10 tools on my CD and can launch more from a flash drive if I need to.

 

[iisjman07]

Thanks for the heads up on winpeshl.ini, I've managed to do what I wanted with the winpe OS. But, I've run into a problem (a pretty big one), when booting the .wim off my bootable flash drive (which I've tested before), the desktop and my nu2menu menu loads, but after about 5 seconds of being loaded the machine uncontrollably reboots... I've tested it in a winpe 3.0 environment and a winpe 2.0, and the same thing happens... The only thing that I've changed that would've affected something like this is the winpeshl.ini so that it loads up nu2menu, so I'm going to try and find an alternative menu and see if that works

 

[ComputerClinic]

I found this post:

Hello,

I found a solution which allows to launch many applications from winpeshl.ini. From what I have observed, it seems you cannot use both [LaunchApp] and [LaunchApps] sections together. So if you have many applications to launch just use [LaunchApps] and put your shell in the last position. Here is my winpeshl.ini file which works fine :

[LaunchApps]
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\system32\startnet.cmd
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Programs\bginfo.exe, "%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Programs\bginfo.bgi /timer:0 /accepteula"
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Programs\nu2menu\nu2menu.exe

Be careful, the syntax of the commands is a bit tricky in case there are arguments. There MUST be a comma after the command itself and, in case there multiple arguments, all the arguments MUST be enclosed between double quotes (see bginfo line in the previous example).

maybe try putting nu2menu at the bottom of launchapps and nothing in launchapp?

 

[ComputerClinic]

I don't know if you solved this yet or not, but I just remembered something. When I was testing my CD in a virtual machine, it wouldn't work with only 256MB or RAM. It would reboot once the CD loaded.

 

[othersteve]

Personally, I began my custom PE wim with Active@ Boot Disk and more or less chopped it to pieces to remove everything I didn't want and add back everything I thought might be useful. I've found it's a wonderful base for a custom PE, though it did take a bit of learning to figure out the customization process.