Help with Imagex / WinPE / bcdboot

drew2000

Ok - I've been working with these tools all morning and have hit a road block. I successfully captured an image that I want to deploy to a client. So far, I've followed this process:

1. Booted from a WinPE CD
2. Created a C: partition and made it active using Diskpart
3. Applied the image using Imagex

At this point I THOUGHT I would be done, until I rebooted and I got "Operating System Not Found." Assuming I needed to establish a BCD store, I did so using BCDedit and the boot store from the WinPE CD.

Now Windows attempts to boot, but basically boot loops. I did sysprep the image with /generalize before I did the capture.

My question is: are there really supposed to be THIS many steps? I can't imagine having to train techs to follow this procedure in a prod environment for each system they deploy. I can live with WinPE and ImageX, but after that it really gets nuts from a "real world" perspective. I realize there are much better tools (WDS/MDT, etc.), but I am trying to master the basic process.

Is my process close to right? or did I miss a crucial step?

Thanks,
Drew

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Comments

apena7

phoeneous wrote: »

Nice, thats exactly what mine looks like.

Im curious, did you assign letter="C" to the windows or system partition in diskpart. And did you /apply the image to c: or d

I should have clarified my process a bit. So I captured the Windows and System partitions from my reference computer, which created two separate WIM files. Using WinPE on my target computer, I then created and labeled two partitions in diskpart - "C" for Windows partition and "S" for the System volume. Next, I applied the WIM files to their respective partitions. I exited from WinPE without entering bootsect or bcdboot commands and was able to reboot normally.

apena7

phoeneous wrote: »

Interesting.

I dont capture the system partition from my reference pc yet I create it in diskpart as C: and after the OS installs, it knows to rename the OS partition to C: as opposed to from diskpart and /apply.

Good to know.

Likewise

altjx

Nice, thank ALL of you for your input. I was very determined to get a customer's PC working without using my own CDs. I had ended up deleting an OS partition, making a Dell recovery partition inaccessible.

After toying around and finding a Factory.wim file, I was determined to make this work.

The bootsect /nt60 C: gave me an "Access is denied." error but after doing bcdboot C:\windows, the boot files were created successfully and I rebooted just fine with the recovery image proceeding as normal.

The only problem I encountered was having two "Microsoft Windows Vista" and "Windows Vista" in the BOOTMGR. Simple way to get rid of it

Again, thanks everyone. Oh, and I'm going take my 70-680 in about 2 weeks, so this was a great experience

Killermac

This is a really excellent thread. It is a real shame that WDS does not work exactly like it should.