WinPE 2.0 Network support - is there some trick?

[Jeremy]

Hi,

I'm playing around with WDS and WinPE 2.0. I'm having heaps of trouble
getting network drivers to load. I've followed the instructions on making a
custom image and have also used the peimg /inf method of adding drivers
offline. I can see that the drivers are there in the image and that some of
them (SCSI or RAID) are loading, but even if I manually try to load the
driver after PE boots using drvload I just can't get the network drivers to
load.

The drivers I am using are typically the ones that work for WS03. Is there
some trick to getting the network to load? Below is a transcript of exactly
what I did.

1: Download WAIK and install
2: Open Command prompt
3: run copype.cmd x86 C:\Winpe_x86
4: run imagex /mount C:\winpe_x86\winpe.wim 1 mount
5: run peimg /inf=<path to inf for NIC driver> mount\Windows
6: run peimg /prep mount\Windows
7: run imagex /unmount /commit mount
8: From WDS add a boot image using the freshly cut winpe.img
9: PXE boot to boot image and run ipconfig with no results

I've used DriverView http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/driverview.html to check
which drivers are loaded and can't see the NIC driver, but CAN see the RAID
or SCSI driver that I have loaded, so the drivers are obviously being
injected correctly, so what am I missing?

Cheers,
Jeremy.

 

[Johan Arwidmark]

1. make sure you have 512 MB RAM otherwise network will not work
2. use drvload while in winpe to load the driver online.
3. once you verified that the driver works online, inject it offline

Regards

Johan Arwidmark
Microsoft MVP - Setup / Deployment

 

[Jeremy]

Thanks I will check this out. On my HP DL380 G5 I had 4 Gb of RAM but on my
VM I had only 384 Mb.
in message

 

[Jeremy]

Alright that worked. Thanks Johan. I gave my VM 516 Mb of RAM and the
driver loaded automatically after I injected it. So I'm not sure what is
happening with my server machine, probably the wrong driver. I'll suss it
out on Monday.
Cheers,
Jeremy.
in message