VistaPE, ATI plugin, and memory

By disabling WPA-PSK in the router, adding the IntelPro Wireless 2200G drivers to C:\Drivers in my laptop, and booting to VistaPE, my laptop can then see the other computers on my home network. So I thought I'd test its ability to wirelessly create and restore from an ATI image archive on one of the other machines. The creation operation looked for all the world as if it was going to work, but then suddenly failed with a 'Not enough memory' error. No harm was done, so I connected the laptop to the router by Ethernet and created the image on another networked PC that way.

So then I wondered whether it could do the restore wirelessly, but after again looking as if it was working once again it failed with the same error. However before failing it had cleared the target partition, leaving me with no OS at all.

I believe VistaPE runs in RAM, and clearly it needs more than the 512MB my laptop has. But there is a problem with it not checking that it is capable of performing a restore before wiping clean the target partition.

I was able to recover using Ethernet, so it isn't too serious a bug, but should be attended to I think.

 

Acronis has never supported using wireless for backups and restores, so its not a bug, just not supported. See this discussion https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=1205411&highlight=wireless+backup#post1205411
.

 

That thread relates to the standalone version of ATI. I'm talking about Mustang's ATI 11 plugin to VistaPE, which is an entirely different matter. VistaPE does support wireless, and the ATI plugin can see all devices on the network, so I'm sorry - it's a bug.

I'm going to test this same process on a machine with more memory, just to confirm or otherwise. Let you know.

 

Earthling:

Don't forget that VistaPE is a volunteer effort; a bunch of the Vista code cobbled together into a minimal-size recovery environment for Windows. While it is remarkable that it does all that it does, it isn't surprising that a few safeguards (like pre-checking for memory requirements) may have fallen through the cracks.

You could post your findings on the Boot Land forum and maybe one of the developers can look at it. I must confess that I did the same experiment wirelessly with ATI 10 and it worked like a champ, but I have 1 GB of RAM in my laptop.

 

Mark:

In that case I'll skip the experiment, as clearly it would work if I bumped up the memory. I had wondered who the authors were, and the last thing I would want to do is slate them over something like this, but I'll take a look at Boot Land and judge whether I want to report it.

 

It still might work with 512 MB. Did you try running TI from the CD instead of from ram. Run WinBuilder and look at my TI app. You will see a check box to run from ram. Unchecking that box will make TI run from the CD instead of from ram. That should solve your problem.

 

That certainly sounds like the answer, especially as I run it from a bootable partition rather than from CD. I'll give it a whirl. In the meantime I did try to repeat the test using another machine, but VistaPE isn't picking up the Ralink WLAN drivers from C:\Drivers during bootup (I didn't want to have to rebuild VistaPE for a one-off test). Any idea as to what I might do about that?

 

Use my add drivers script from my website. It is a more reliable way to add drivers.

 

... and it has, now that VistaPE 011 is available again. Thanks for the tip, and for clarifying the situation with the Boot Land servers in my other thread.