WinPE, RIS and WMI

[Guest]

I am in the process of developing a WinPE based solution for deploying
workstations for an upcoming Windows XP Deployment. I am Booting to WinPE
(with WMI,ADO and VBS support added) via RIS, which i have got working fine.
The problem comes when i try to run a script to do the actual build. The
scripts makes a couple of very basic WMI calls to determine the hardware on
which it is running, so that it can load the correct image.

When i have only 1 pc connected to the RIS server and booted to WinPE. The
script works as intended, however, when i boot a second pc to start a second
installation, with the initial pc still running, the script fails on the
second and subsequent pc's with error 0x80041014, which is a WMI
Initilization error. This defeats the purpose of trying to take advantage of
the extra capabilities of WinPE with WMI over RIS.

I have also tried booting WinPE and running wbemtest.exe instead of my
script and this fails on the second pc with the same error code, so i know
its not my script at fault.

Is there any way i can boot WinPE via RIS and have WMI work on multiple
machines at the same time? ( i have approx 1100 workstations to upgrade and
one at a time is going to be awful slow!)

 

[Johan Arwidmark]

The only workaround I can think of is to use multiple WinPE images on
the RIS Server.

I have tried to disable both setupapi logging (which is recommended
when booting WinPE over RIS) and WMI logging as well as
compiling/booting WinPE with the /inram switch, but that didnt help.

The next version of WinPE (2005) will be able to boot entirely into
RAM (eg. with all handles closed to the RIS server) which should solve
these kind of problems.

regards
Johan Arwidmark

Windows User Group - Nordic
http://www.wug-nordic.net

 

[Michael Niehaus [MS]]

Does the account that you are using to log into RIS have read/write access
to the RIS remote install share or does it have read-only access? I believe
this should work with no issues as long as the account (or accounts) do not
have read/write access, as this allows Windows PE to create temporary files
on the remote install share, which causes issues.

-Michael Niehaus
Senior Consultant
MCS US Centers of Excellence - Deployment AOS
(e-mail address removed)
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the feedback guys,

It was indeed the permissions on the Reminst share. As soon as i set this
to read only, the problem went away. A gotcha to note down for next time

Thanks again for you help

Doug

 

[Johan Arwidmark]

Jee... why didnt I think of that one...

Thanks Michael for the info...

regards
Johan Arwidmark

Windows User Group - Nordic
http://www.wug-nordic.net