Update packs : http://www.ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6228

Question:

Do you know of a way to add apps, i.e. OpenOffice as we currently do with Nlite with WinRar files.

I know, this is off topic with the DP site but the future holds both XP and Vista.

I tried your links for Vista updates etc. and they worked perfectly, took 4 hours to slip SP1 and Vlite of all updates etc.

Thank for the help and advice.

Hope we can interest the others in this.

Stu

Allanf has released a new project that allows to completely customize a Windows PE 2.x:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.p … topic=4431

And Markus8 released an open source Windows PE driver integrator: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4357

Hope these works can help driverpacks.

I used vistabootpro a few times (in vista x32 machines in which XP was loaded after vista.) but have not heard proof it can do vista x64 and vista x32 dualboot.
I will buy me a good testbed for that. I am no longer restricted to one machine of my own anyway..
I have to grin now.. Bigbrit? I have a few testplanks with "crap" feature, and crap helps find issues.

Vista unattended is new to me, and I have seen nothing yet that looks like a simple "how to" for noobies.
(the few "simple" guides I see on the web were wrong in some detail, or were about a detail only..)

@ alex, Thanks.

here´s an update from me on the Vista driverintegration "thing" with respect to DVD installs and WDS installs.

Seems like the following is true for the $WinPEDriver$ folder:

1. On DVD installations it works as expected. However currently there are problems with some chipset drivers. When the Intel Chipset drivers or the Radeon SB/NB drivers are present in the folder, WinPE will stop the Bootprocess saying that some critical bootdrivers could not be loaded. Removing those drivers from the folder solved the problem. Other than that I have not found any errors. In theory, this folder is also good for bootcritical drivers, all other drivers are prestaged for the Vista setup.

2. On WDS installs, one has to watch out for 3 things:

- The $WinPEDriver$ folder has to be integrated into boot.wim so it is available on the X: driver during WinPE startup phase. Maybe it is possible to map a network drive before that but WinPE checks for the existance of this folder at a very early time so maybe networking is not available at that point in time. Since the X: drive is essentially a RAM drive I am wondering how this would work if the $WinPEDriver$ folder grows large. How will that folder fit into the RAM drive ?!? This may be a problem for the future.

- Adding network drivers to that folder is not enough for WDS boots. In addition to that, the network drivers also have to be integrated into the boot.wim image using the peimg /inf command. If this is not done, the WinPE Bootprocess will stop saying that no network driver is present for booting from the WDS Server.

- Adding the network drivers to boot.wim using the peimg /inf command does not (!) add those drivers to the Vista installation later on. According to Microsoft this should work (at least I have interpreted their documents that way) but it does not. So in addition to adding them using the peimg /inf command one has to place those drivers in the $WinPEDriver$ folder or add them to the Vista image in another way.

- Microsoft reps told me on an MS forum to add an extra driverpath entry to the "Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsWinPE" pass of the autounattend.xml. Not only are the credentials used to connect to that folder written in cleartext to the xml, I could not get this to work at all with Vista + SP1. The setupact.log file did not contain any reference to that folder after the installation so I guess it wasn´t even checked. Have not found a solution to this problem although for DVD installations that may work, don´t know yet.

To conclude, a driverpack installer for Vista would probably have to cope with various different situations. There does not seem to be one perfect way to do this for everyone although the $WinPEDriver$ folder is close to that.

Bye,
Alex

Dual Booting is cake   UNLESS    you do what I did...

I put a 40GB IDE HDD in my "drawer" Drive Bay and opened my bios and Specified my boot sequence so that the Drawer was Primary and the SATA drives and IDE RAID were tertiary. This has Always worked flawlessly on my GigaByte MB. 

However enter hasta la Vista... I run setup and I feed it the driver and wait for setup to load the files and reboot, and I wait gleefully for the second part of setup but instead I am sad. the boot tracks are on the SATA drive, and my system won't boot  at all  and I have to repair my sata's boot tracks.

I finally had to disconnect all the other drives in the system to load Vista on the IDE drive.
You may be thinking "well, it's kinda silly to put vista on the IDE drive when you have SATA available..."
but I don't have a spare sata removable drive that I can format ATM nor do i wish to molest my primary setup ATM. but I digress,

The point is, it doesn't work as well as it's predecessor.
   IE had I been in this situation with XP;
      I could have used notepad for the boot.ini, and fdisk /mbr for the boot-track
      and I would have been off to the races in no time at all.

In retrospect i should have just ghosted my primary sata to the drawer and repartitioned,
but hind-sight is always 20/20... ain't it?