wimboot & winpe - assorted questions

[jpwise]

(2012-10-05 13:06)robinsmidsrod Wrote:  I would definitely go with adding appropriate network drivers to your PE image and then bootstrapping the rest of your environment from a SMB network share that contains all the fast-mutating files. Getting that network share mounted to a common drive letter should be fairly trivial with a bundled batch script. I don't really see any reason to package those additional files as a zip. Why don't just use them as-is from the network?

Yeah, I'm thinking along these lines at the moment currently. It's a somewhat locked down client/dmz area the utils are run in so smb is out, but would be easy enough to download a zip from http (wget etc) and then unzip/run in local. So that's my current leaning at the moment unless a better option eventuates.

(2012-10-05 13:09)mcb30 Wrote:  Modifying a .wim image is fairly painless if you use the Linux version of imagex (available as part of wimlib). On Windows, mounting and unmounting images seems to take a substantial amount of time; on Linux it's almost instantaneous.

Try modifying the byte at offset 0x78 within the .wim file, which I think holds the boot index value.

If this works, then it would be viable to add support for wimboot modifying the boot index in response to a command-line parameter.

Michael

Hi Michael, also thank you for the prompt response (although starting to wonder what timezone you guys are in since it's 1am in the morning here ;p). I haven't worked with wimlib before but will definitely have to take a look at it. Another complicating factor is the setup is run across three sites, which sync nightly from an online master. So modifying the wims may mean more data transfer, but definitely worth considering in the equation. Modifying the boot offset is over my head at the moment, although the information i linked earlier does seem to have a number of the offset addresses listed. When i'm a bit more awake I'll see if I can build a multi index file, and have a play with tweaking it's index selection.

Thanks again both for your responses.
Jp.