Imagine for yourself the better of three worlds.
The read me files found in MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack ).
Those read me files describe deployment and recovery tools and  mention imageX and how you can create installers.
(YOU find out where. OK?)

In XP and Vista, the RTM and OEM (and smal bizz or corp with VLK but no SA.) never had what corporate users paying for SA could buy.
It got better, and will get better still.
The beta of Win7 in public is not same to what "chosen" beta testers test.
There is a public beta for "clean metal", and there is a beta for beta testers for "upgrade" and "crossgrade".
The underground seems to like the ultimate corporate version. The world needs oem, cross, and up, and retail.
(Have you sometimes wondered why vista cracked version is ultimate, and not retail? A retail cannot always do a straight upgrade-like when legacy is not legit-, but it can usuablly be used as upgrade.
(( can it do a downgrade? (°-°) to get legit?))

But.. think? Ey, Large OEM pay less than VLK price. Retail pays a high premium for the freedom it offers you. 8-(

whatever you people may think, I think we are getting shoo'd out of our market.
(and I HOPE they do it, and make it accessible to all..)

Yeah, but I have a temporary solution ... I copied the two files peimg.exe and peimg.ini over from a WAIK 1.1 installation. Still works fine on Windows7 with WAIK 2.0 beta. :-)

Bye,
Alex

well, the new WAIK also makes it a bit more complicated. It contains dism.exe and can be installed on Vista/XP so dism.exe is available there. However, the new WAIK does not come with peimg.exe anymore to service an offline WinPE image (for instance add drivers). Dism.exe is supposed to replace that according to the documentation.

However this only works for Windows 7 /WinPE 3.0 (that comes with W7) images, not for pre Windows 7 images. Since you cannot have both WAIKs installed, there is now no way to add drivers to a Vista PE image when the new WAIK is installed.

Or am I missing something here ??

Bye,
Alex

there is a new WAIK beta available now for Windows7 and Vista. That should make things easier :-)

Answering my own post ....

1. WAIK did install on Windows 7. Must have done something wrong yesterday :-)
2. Mounting/Unmounting Windows 7 Images with imageX on Vista works fine. For driver injection dism.exe on Vista also works so one has to use both tools on Vista.

Bye,
Alex

I was wondering ... since WAIK is currently not able to install on Windows 7 (at least out of the box) and dism.exe does not seem to be able to mount wim images on Vista how do you deal with two situations:

- when running on Windows 7 and you wish to mount Vista wim images for driver injection for instance ... do you use dism.exe ?

- when running on Vista and you wish to mount Windows 7 wim images for driver injection ... do you use imagex.exe to mount the Vista images ?

The following command works fine on Windows 7 but on Vista I get the "The mount-wim" option is unkown, error message even though I have copied the Dism.exe + DISM folder to the System32 directory and registered the dlls as you wrote in your guide ...

dism.exe /Mount-Wim /Wimfile:%WinImagex64% /index:%Index% /MountDir:%Mount%

What do you think ?

Bye,
Alex

It is by far the easiest thing I have found to mount the WIM image etc but, I think I have an old version, I can't resize the window etc, don't know if what I have is the latest one.

Jaak can do an edit.
True.
My problem about DISM was that it linked to tools and features I personally could pay 25.000 dollar per breach of NDA..
Faik, NOBODY at DriverPacks had SA and licences to DISM and its tools.

I won't have to apologise to DriverPacks for things I helped DriverPacks do for XP.
I can not help in vista or future OS until the time we have what we need have.
Jaak.

What the hurmphh..
I should know when I have to ask I have all I ever stood for here get pullled, or that I have to ask DriverPacks support for vista and XP get two separate sites.

I see XP/2003/2000/2000 as separate entity. (because the tool used is seen as not  fought by msft.)

I see a tool based on SA subscribtion will limit the use to those with SA.
(S. A. aka software assurance.. a form of subscribtion)
As is, (to my regret) the old Free DPint.exe, the old waik, the old WIM, is not free and is not comparable to the best of tools we have for free.
(for vista and 08 and 07; dpam, and winpre/winpe is a powerful module in dpam.  WIM builder for vista and 08 or win7, and downwards, are in the dpam tool).
Licensed beta testers may have seen this evolve, and may have helped resolve issues it had with early OS in this NOT yet liberated manager.

For now, it is not yet liberated and not intended to be a vehicle for setup in any form I know of.

Hence forth, my word;
caveat.

The only thing DriverPacks have to abide to is that methods (what you can do in there) and tools (what is provided by open source) used to get our users a true DriverPacks open source, does not use a patented tool we have no licence for.

MY three wishes.
* For every thought thought, a thought we do not miss.
* Do what we can, to not have to 'msft' do what we can.
* Do your worst, and do your best think within contraints of existing rules, and stay within.