In the hopes to help you avoid some issues I was having with WinPE2 in a complete virtual environment, I thought I would post a couple things.
The environment I was working in is
Host machine:
Windows Vista x64
8GB RAM
VMware Workstation 6.5.3
1. WinPE environment does not start or fails with messages like:
Windows Boot Manager
Windows failed to start....
...
File: \windows\system32\config\system <- This file seems to change depending on how much memory you assign
Status: 0xc0000001
Info: Windows failed to load because the system registry file is missing, or corrupt
- This occurred when the RAM assigned was not high enough. The default for a Windows XP vm is 512 MB which I used because, well because :). I set to 1024 and it worked fine. After playing around with this, I was able to get it to start with a minimum of 600MB.
Also had it get through all these file and just sit at a black screen. Seemed like it still could not fully load.
2. Loading proper nic drivers. The NIC drivers need to be created as a software module and then imported into the WinPE2 Deployment Engine. The files are in the VMware directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation). The files are (at least all I needed):
- netadapter.inf
- vmnet.sys
- vmnetadapter.cat
- vmnetadapter.sys
- vnetinst.dll
The next part is the disk controllers, but that is normal also.
I really hope this saves some people some grief
Martin Carnegie
Gulf Breeze Software
http://www.gulfsoft.com
