If you are performing a migration to a new deployment suite, or if you just like to have every disk imaging tool in a WinPE WIM ready at a moment's notice, you might want to consider adding the Microsoft Automated Deployment Services (ADS) for legacy image support.

First off you will need to get a copy of the tools and the easiest way is to run the setup wizard for ADS and perform a custom installation. Be careful which options you install, multiple PXE agents in an environment could destroy all your hard work, see a screenshot of the installation options I used below.

Once installed you will need to collect the following file and incorporate them into your tools folder for WinPE.

• "%windir%\system32\adssupport.dll"
• "%programfiles%\Microsoft ADS\bin\*.*"

Done, enjoy.

The WinPE customisations keep coming, wanting more information about the system you are running WinPE on?

If you are familiar with BGInfo, you already know that it is a great way of displaying information about a system and you probably already use it in your base server build (for those not in the know check out BGInfo on TechNet). But what you may not know is that it works in WinPE and you can draw that same information out and display it on the screen.

Simply add the BGInfo executable and custom layout file to your WinPE scripts directory, modify your unattend.xml to include "X:\BGInfo.exe /accepteula /timer:0 /iqX:\WinPE.bgi /silent" and you are up and running.

To get you started I have added my layout file for download WinPE.zip (.86 KB).

NOTE: BGInfo is a 32-bit executable and since WinPE 2.0 64-bit doesn't support WOW it will only work in a 32-bit WinPE environment.

Something that I have been meaning to write up for some time now...

In nearly every environment I have worked in I have always come across some type of issue with Broadcom NICs.

In my most recent bout, it was determined that the network wasn't always (seemed to swap between having link negotation issues and invalid IP addresses) 100% initialised in WinPE before a task in the unattend.xml started executing. In our particular case we were working with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit which builds a custom WinPE image as part of deployment point synchronising.

Sample boot.bat

@echo off
echo.
echo INFO: Executing Sleep
echo.
cscript //nologo "%systemdrive%\sleep.vbs" 10
echo.
echo INFO: Renewing IP Address
ipconfig /renew
echo.
echo INFO: Executing Sleep
echo.
cscript //nologo "%systemdrive%\sleep.vbs" 10
echo.

Sample sleep.vbs

Unattend.xml Extract

< RunSynchronous >
   < RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action = " add " >
      < Description > CommandBreak WINPE Customisations </ Description >
      < Order > 1 </ Order >
      < Path > X:\boot.bat </ Path >
   </ RunSynchronousCommand >
   < RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action = " add " >
      < Description > Lite Touch PE </ Description >
      < Order > 2 </ Order >
      < Path > wscript.exe X:\Deploy\Scripts\LiteTouch.wsf </ Path >
   </ RunSynchronousCommand >
</ RunSynchronous >