[syslinux] Most efficient way of pxe booting windows pe

Arends, R.R. r.r.arends at hro.nl
Wed Mar 30 02:58:52 PDT 2011


Daniel,

>>  We are using syslinux (memdisk) and gpxe already for a while.
>> Also got a working winpe boot method by means of pxe. Which 
>> basicly is a dd of an 'recovery partition' where winpe.wim is on.
>> That method isn't really the most efficient way, cause its 
>> loaded into memory twice. 
>> 
>> We are going to do a major windows 7 deployment soon and i'm 
>> looking for the most efficient way of booting a small winpe.
>> Can anyone tell me the options and what is the best and most 
>> efficient method of today into booting a winpe.wim?
> 
> We're using PXELINUX with memdisk to boot a WinPE ISO (RAM disk,
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd799303(WS.10).aspx),
> transferred by HTTP using gpxe. Takes about 15 seconds to transfer on a
> LAN.
> 

Thanks for the headsup, didn't knew that booting a winpe.iso (ramdisk) worked aswel.
Gonna try that right away, might need to use a newer memdisk i guess.

Editing the iso will be easier then editing a dd of a ntfs diskimage with winpe on it. 

> Our 64-bit ISO image is ~172 MB, even when loaded twice we're only
> talking about ~350 MB RAM. Our Windows 7 machines have 2048-4096 MB RAM,
> can't see the problem.

Agreeing with that, but if there is a method of loading it ones off corse that would be preferred.
So i just wanted to know if there was something new i didn't knew about which is more efficient, but apperently not. 
Was more thinking about the sdi.c32 thingy. Or some new development on that. 

> 
> Cheers,
> Daniel

Thanks for the reply, i will try the memdisk bigraw iso method. 

Rgds,

/reni





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