Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

At the moment this is the only tool that can slipstream SP1 , so you dont have a choice.
And .NET is slipstreamable into Vista, so that isnt a problem also.

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

Nuno Brito wrote:

I really don't understand why people keep pushing .NET when it's so heavy, slow and creates all sort of obstacles to work right.

Uhh, I'm not a coder (I got fundamental knowledge, though wink) 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...?

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

It's a true nightmare to support .NET inside Windows PE 1.x/2.x and when thinking about a tool to customize Vista it would be wise to think about portability.

Also the same applies for everyone else looking forward to run these tools on other OS's like reactOS or *nix's wine in the future.

Look at the discussion for the mentioned tool from AlbertS and read the amount of posts regarding people trying to run it let alone do some real work.

So many other coding languages available and I'd really prefer to see java being used as it is much easier to carry around and install.

-------------

Why should a person install a 200Mb framework to run a 200Kb program that could be coded using any open-souce or freeware available coding language like autoIt and such?

I say move away from MS claws to gain overall work efficiency.

smile

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

Nuno Brito wrote:

It's a true nightmare to support .NET inside Windows PE 1.x/2.x and when thinking about a tool to customize Vista it would be wise to think about portability.

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.

Also the same applies for everyone else looking forward to run these tools on other OS's like reactOS or *nix's wine in the future.

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
wink

Look at the discussion for the mentioned tool from AlbertS and read the amount of posts regarding people trying to run it let alone do some real work.

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

So many other coding languages available and I'd really prefer to see java being used as it is much easier to carry around and install.

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.

Why should a person install a 200Mb framework to run a 200Kb program that could be coded using any open-souce or freeware available coding language like autoIt and such?

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 smile

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

We due respect I think that we still don't need .NET to handle anything related to Vista and we've been proving this point with the VistaPE project for nearly two years now.

vLite is using the wimfltr files that are shipped with the WAIK and this is likely the only critical matter that any Vista tool will have to handle. Driverpacks can achieve much better results with any other coding language not based on .NET.

I know vLite good enough and we (at boot land) are also hosting vlite and nlite for some time as well (look on the links at each download page) and knowing well the weakness on these tools, I think that we can code much smaller and efficient binaries to run without restrictions and working flawlessly out of the box.

Also worth mentioning that the use of WimFltr both by Nuhi and AllbertS is highly questionable as it only comes from the WAIK and the respective EULA doesn't allow redistribution even thought we all close our eye to this details and ignore the obvious - but how long will MS close their eyes? (maybe a similar future to autopatcher awaits?)

I am actively looking for a freeware/open source solution to solve this matter and already have a few good ideas on how this can be achieved with free tools.

---------

Mono is only allowed for Novel customers and developers because of their joint patent agreement with MS.

I don't use Java, delphi 7 is my weapon of choice but there are many other options out there.

smile

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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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Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

Good luck with the codings! smile

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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.

The answer was 42?
Kind regards, Jaak.

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

I dual-boot between Vista64 and XP 32, but by the bios selection, not boot.ini.
I've found that better for me so if I choose to nuke a partition it doesn't screw up the bootloader for the other partition.

You are meant to install XP first, then Vista, but you can do it backwards only if you run the Vista boot repair utility last.

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Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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

But we are going oftopic..

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

vista did away with the whole boot.ini / loader thing - and it made me sad...
In the end I saw no useful purpose for the new boot-loader system...
What was gained by switching from a known good system? IDK...

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?

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Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

not much help if your testing to see if the drivers worked wink
or in my case, you wanted to play HALO...

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Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

nice big_smile

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

The RAM drive size can be set.
it is, of course, obvious that you should not specify larger than what is there. smile

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.

The answer was 42?
Kind regards, Jaak.

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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.

smile

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

Muiz, I know you are into Vista and use Vlite.

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

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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

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Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

I use WPI also

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

Me three... wink

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Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

Driverpacks : http://www.ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6703

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

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

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

Re: Vista driverpacks and slipstreamer

I wanted to do this on driverpacks.net first.
But lots of anti Vista people here, so i decided to do it on ryanvm.