Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer (Page 3 of 3)

Uhh, I'm not a coder (I got fundamental knowledge, though ) but from what I've read and experienced myself (I am using various .NET applications all day) it's neither heavy nor slow and there really aren't any obstacles whatsoever if you do not count to obligatory framework installation (which is also required for JAVA, for example; and a lot of other tools ususally needed this and that runtime file in the past so, personally, I consider the .NET FW a big step forward.

Also, if you are creating an unattended installation disc, you can easily slipstream .NET into the source (there's a lot of all-in-one .NET packages available; or you can easily create your own), so it's no obstacle in my eyes.

Honestly, I have been reading a bit into .NET in some scientific journals and they all talked very highly about it, plus, given the examples presented, I could see why.

I think what most people fear is that .NET will bloat up their isntallation and slow down their computers.
Well, .NET does only run when an application needs it and it's not that bloated, either (compare it to, say, DX runtime files).
Plus, whatever is in .NET has to be less in the single applications, isn't that a gain, too?

The other thing folks are afraid of, from what I have read at numerous places, is that .NET would contain security risks and spyware from MS.
Well, I dunno about the first, but it probably only occurs in conjunction with a .NET application and as for the second one, you are already using Windows, what more would there be to be worried about, really...?

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Ok, that may be an issue, I haven't considered that.
As for portability - while I am using a plethora of portable apps on my USB stick, I don't wuite see any need for such a tool on it.
Also, you'd still have to install the WIM filter drivers which certainly cannot be done in a true portable way (ie not installing/touching anything on the host system), so that could be a dead end.

Well, what about Mono?
Isn't that exactly supposed to run .NET programmes on *NIX systems?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_%28software%29
Oh, and what about portable.NET?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable.NET

Yeah, had some problems myself.
Simply didn't slipstream the SP1 no matter what I tried.
Don't think it's neccessarily .NET-related.

While I personally do not object Java, there's a lot of people who dislike it (just as there is for .NET).
Doubt there's be less problems, though, as I suppose that is rather due to slipstreaming SP1 generally being unsupported by MS.

True, any framework only pays off if you are using a lot of apps that are based on it (so the app size can be smaller because a lot of stuff is in the FW).
But as I said initially, some ten years ago or so, you'd need a plethora of runtime files for all the various programmes and languages that were used.
Then you had version conflicts and whatnot.
Therefore, I do see the FW as a step forward.

Anyway, vLite ( http://vlite.net/download.html ) has been released in a new version that also supports SP1 slipstreaming.
Granted, it also uses .NET but maybe that will work better for you

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the existing base code is autoit so were starting with that... i almost got RC3 nailed down.

they finaly decided to include the hotfixes they said they wern't going to... figures...

I have totaly cleaned house on the core of Base and it is ready for final testing and ready for some new features and Vista.
I now have 2.5 gig of ram so i can use my machine (and a removable HDD) for test installing on a live machine. 

i got to get back to coding now...

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I just wish I could help.

Is there anybody here whom dualbooted 64bit/32bit?
I have no spare machines atm and want a X64 OS for hosting VMs, and 32bit to fall back to (a live 32bit machine) but not by choosing at BIOS level.

http://www.vistabootpro.org with this tool , its no problem.

But we are going oftopic..

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I use Vmware with 2 vistas x86 & x64 for testing things.

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Hi guys,

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

i can also test with vista as i have both the non SP1 and SP1 installations

There is already a lot of good projects that can be used to learn how to tweak a Windows Vista/2008 DVD.

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 use WPI.  And it works perfectly in both XP and Vista installs.

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Thanks a lot muiz. I searched so long for Vista-DriverPacks ... and perhaps we will have that here ...