Re: [Etherboot-users] PXE and WinPE ?

[Cristian M. <cri...@on...>]

Roy Wiseman wrote:
> I also found this site
> http://www.activewin.com/interviews/microsoft/39.shtml
> 
> The discussion of Windows 2003 server SP1 WinPE
> running over PXE is very interesting, but no details !
> Please, if someone has achieved this on this list, I'd
> love to know how this is done ??
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Roy.
> 
> 
> ActiveWin.com: What are the new WinPE-specific
> features for SP1 of Windows Server 2003?
> 
> Wes Miller: There are three key features:
> 
> An X64 version of WinPE 
> 
> Support for booting WinPE from a USB Flash Drive 
> 
> Support for booting WinPE from a RAM disk. 
> 
> The last feature is I think something people may not
> realize the benefits of immediately, but once they
> understand it, will become invaluable. It will allow
> WinPE to boot from almost any PXE server (today RIS is
> the only supported PXE server for net-booting WinPE,
> support for booting from CD and then removing the boot
> media from the drive, and even booting WinPE from a
> hard disk and then repartitioning/reformatting the
> drive it just booted from.
> 
> 
> --- Roy Wiseman <roy...@ya...> wrote:
> 
>> Please help. This mailing list has helped me a great
>> deal with PXE setup and I use PXE booting all the
>> time
>> now. I can PXE boot any system to DOS or to
>> ThinStation, and all of this technology works
>> incredibly well. However, booting to DOS is great,
>> and
>> with a good Network Boot Disk, I can make network
>> connections to any system and start installations
>> etc,
>> but it would be far far better to PXE boot Bart's
>> WinPE disk.
>>
>> All I can find are the following pages :
>>
>> http://oss.netfarm.it/guides/pxe.php
>>
>>
> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304992&sd=tech
>> these are not much use as they talk about RIS
>> servers
>> and using Linux servers to boot. The thing is that I
>> have my TFTP and DHCP server setup, and I just want
>> to
>> put a WinPE image in there and boot it as
>> ThinStation
>> or any other image does. Does anyone have any
>> experience of getting this working, as it would be
>> very powerful to boot any diskless or new system
>> straight to WinPE and have a full Windows
>> environment
>> running from RAM booting across the network ?
>>
>>
>> 		

  I had to recover a windows system and somehow I couldn't do it with a
linux network boot system so I used Bart's XPE builder to
build the windows equivalent of knoppix, I did not used it before, just
heard of it, and I was impressed by the capabilities.
  I did some digging as a result and found this:
http://wiki.stormchasers.dk/?pagename=WindowsPEOverPXE
  which may be of interest to you. I didn't test the procedure there, 
since I don't have a windows 2003 SP1 machine or a PE licence, but it 
seems ok.

   I also found a lot of links in the msfn.com forums and it seems  some 
people there already did this. I'm not sure if Bart's XPE works with 
this method, it could be that Win PE 1.5 (?) is required to take 
advantage of this.
   My thoughs on this are that downloading an entire cd over tftp takes 
too much time and winPE is a bit too limited (although Bart's XPE 
removes some of these), plus the memory requirements. If I want a rescue 
cd with more and more programs, I will need more memory on the client. 
Perhaps somebody with more windows experience (I have close to none :) 
can improve Bart's XPE and modify it so it could run programs from a 
network drive (much as a linux diskless client can boot and load 
everything from the net).

  anyway, the discussion is getting off-topic here, perhaps in the 
future more and more people will succeed in booting PE over PXE/TFTP and 
their experience will produce more documentation to learn from.


hth,
mitu