WinPE does not do anything?

I am experimenting with the WinPE ISO options.

When booting into the environment all I get is:

start \Acronis\Files\TrueImage.exe /D\Acronis\Files

and absolutely nothing happens!


Yes I know there are other options but I wand to experiment with actual WinPE. What is the problem here? Thanks!

 

Acronis doesn't supply WinPE. The ISO builder they provide only works if you have the actual WinPE from Microsoft. I have no idea why they bothered, since so few people have access to WinPE.

I did have success by pointing the ISO builder to a Norton Ghost 10 Recovery disk. Ghost 10 is based on WinPE. I needed a way to get a real command prompt. I did it by replacing one of the Utilities on the Ghost 10 disk with a copy of cmd.exe. When I got to the command prompt, I ran startnet.cmd. Then I changed directories to the Acronis plugin and ran TrueImage.exe. I also modified startnet.cmd to automatically start TI to save a step.

I would say you should stick with BartPE. It's much simpler. Adding drivers to WinPE is difficult if you don't have the WinPE builder that comes with WinPE.

EDIT: I may have misinterpreted your post. Do you actually have WinPE? If you do, try starting TrueImage.exe without the /D\Acronis\Files switch. If you can't get it to work, you're not missing much. All they did was copy in their BartPE plugin. The only extra thing they did was enable Universal Restore if you have it installed on your system. You always have the option to use my BartPE plugin that also supports UR and has more functions working (including image mounting).

 

Thanks Mustang. Yes I am trying an OEM WinPE.

Thanks for your plugin btw... awesome!

I tried from trueimage.exe by itself = nothing happens... no error and cursor returns at cmd line!

There are 3 things I wanted to see with WinPE however:

a) If support for NDAS works in this environment - seems to be missing through BartPE

b) I want to see if/how much faster booting into WinPE environment is vs. BartPE. Even though with BartPE there is so much more functionality, most of the time really all I want is proper USB 2.0 performance which is missing in the Linux envoronment but even stripped of most plugins BPE takes too long to boot (well longer than I would like.)

c) I would assume that all network drivers included with XP SP2 when building with BPE they should be available however I have a bunch of workstations with onboard Broadcom 1Gb NICs and for some reason they do not work with BPE. I am guessing that the drivers are indeed there but there is some sort of IRQ conflict.

Thanks again!

 

Hi Paul,

I just checked my disk. It runs fine with start \Acronis\Files\trueimage.exe /D\Acronis\Files
in startnet.cmd. Are you sure it picked up the plugin? It needs to be installed in C:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageWorkstation\BartPE. Where Workstation would be your version of TI. If the plugin is not there when you run the ISO builder, you won't get it into WinPE. What happens when you change directories to \Acronis\Files and type. dir in WinPE? Can you see the files? If you run regedit in WinPE, can you see the registry entries in the plugin inf file show up?

WinPE won't boot any faster than BartPE.

I don't have any NDAS experience, but I would think you would need a driver plugin to get it working in either BartPE or WinPE.

Have you put the Broadcom network drivers in \pebuilder\drivers\Net before you build your BartPE. That should work. I have Broadcom 4300 4400 and 5700 drivers in mine. It works fine.

 

Thanks fro looking at this.

First of all I could swear that booting into WinPE is considerably faster but if you say not I will trust you.

On the Broadcom no I didn't... these drivers are built into XP though... does BPE by default not include all NIC drivers from the XP source media?

Regarding WinPE... the programs seem to be all where they should be in WinPE. The only ONE registry entry I see is HKLM/Software/Acronis/Universal.../workstation... and all it seems to contain is (I think) a registration info. When I look in BPE there are tonnes of Acronis registry entries...

 

Your Broadcom drivers may be built into Window. That just means they will be present in a newly created Windows system. The drivers that are started in WinPE or BartPE are only a limited set. You will need to add the Broadcom drivers in BartPE.

I just realized you must be using build 3854. The Acronis BartPE plugin does not work. They forgot two important DLL's that are not present in WinPE. You need to add msvcp71.dll and msvcr71.dll. They are normally in the System32 folder. I think TrueImage.exe will be happy if you put them in the BartPE plugin before you use the ISO builder. Put them in C:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageWorkstation\BartPE\Files and C:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageWorkstation\BartPE\Files\Drivers, just to be safe. Then rebuild with the ISO builder. Let me know if that works.

 

Putting them in just the ... files folder seems to do the trick. There is an immediate error on clicking backup... "X:\Documents...\Default..\..Desktop ... is unavailable but seems can just click through that. Makes sense that there is no desktop lol but nice to fix that somehow.

I'm going to play around with comparing bootup speed and post back.


Thanks again!

 

Alright. Just like you said... the boot times are the same with BPE vs WPE!

Fixed the WPE desktop error with a regdit to user shell folders. I am still going to play around with WPE to compare drivers etc. but at this point I don't see any reason to use this environment at all.

I noticed something else unrelated that I find interesting and might be food for thought... the reason why bootup from CD is so slow seems to be related to CD drive seeks... I am guessing this is to do with all these small files? If I run inside a VM using an ISO mounted as a virtual drive then bootup is REALLY fast!

 

Hi Paul,

I didn't see the desktop error because I was using the Ghost 10 CD instead of an OEM WinPE. They must have supplied the necessary user profile.

I agree, but it was fun to play around with it. BartPE is more user friendly.

You will also find that BartPE boots very fast if you put it on a USB 2.0 flash drive.

 

Hi Mustang,

Boy! there is no doubt that you have got this whole BartPE/WinPE/Plugin thing well sussed. I take my hat off to you.

Regards