wimboot & winpe - assorted questions

[robinsmidsrod]

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?

If you regularly boot hardware that doesn't have drivers in the PE image, I'd consider booting these machines from USB network adapters to avoid the driver issue and just update the PE image when you start noticing new network hardware is getting common. Alternatively you can build a PE that automatically scans local storage (including floppies and USB storage devices) for drivers to install and start automatically before the network part of the batch script is executed.