WinPE 2005 RIS RAM disk boot & WMI

[rhfreeman]

Hi all,

I've got a problem I need some help with.

I'm using SMS OSD and I've built a custom WinPE 2005 using Win2003 SP1
as the source code. As a result, I am now able to successfully boot
from an .ISO image on the RIS server.

When I built the WinPE image, I also enabled WMI support. However, I am
unable to get it to work. I've replaced osdshell.exe with the lab
shell, so I can open a command prompt. When I try to do "net start
winmgmt" the service fails to start, with the message "the service did
not report an error".

Using wbemtest to connect to the repository fails with 0x80080005. I
presume this is because it is trying to the write into the wbem
directory, which is read-only as the X: drive is marked as a CD-ROM
image.

I want to use the RAM disk to avoid the problems of setupapi.log & the
WMI repository being written to the RIS server if it is booted from the
files instead of an ISO. When I marked them as read-only, the WMI also
failed.

So how can I make this work? Is there something I can to get the WBEM
area written into RAM instead? I tried passing the /inram flag in the
RIS .sif file, but that didn't help. Other suggestions welcome!

Thanks,

Rich

 

[Johan Arwidmark]

WinPE WMI works fine on readonly media.

Make sure that you didn't use a thirdparty iso-utility that truncated
the long paths in the WinSxS folder.

Also, don't ever use the OSD "Update WinPE" feature over a UNC path
since it wont copy empty directorys (WMI requires a few). Known bug.

regards

Johan Arwidmark
Microsoft MVP - Setup/Deployment

 

[rhfreeman]

Also, don't ever use the OSD "Update WinPE" feature over a UNC path
since it wont copy empty directorys (WMI requires a few). Known bug.

Thanks Johan... that was it exactly, when I recreated my .WIM PE image
using a local path it came out about 10k bigger and suddenly the
winmgmt service would work just fine.

I'm not exactly sure where it writes the data, but it isn't to the RIS
server so that is all that matters to me!

Thanks for the quick response also!

Rich