In "Getting started with Windows PE" I said that (once you have got the Windows AIK) the stages were
Stage 1 uses Copype.cmd to put the Windows PE files somewhere you can create the image; Stage 3 uses OScdIMG to make a CD Image of the OS from the "ISO" folder, or you can copy that folder to a usb key.
Which leaves stage 2
One customization is to add utilities to the bootable PE media, e.g. the ImageX tool and the associated wimscript.ini. Simply copy these to the ISO folder, e.g.
md c:\WinPE_x86\iso\[your stuff]copy [your stuff] c:\WinPE_x86\iso\[your stuff]
A classic thing to include is the imageX utility. Something has changed with this: it no longer needs an INI file to tell it what to exclude - I gave out duff information on this at the event in London on Friday. Doh!The other customization is to change what is installed in Windows PE the image you're going to boot from. This is held in a WIM file which is extracted into a RAM disk at boot time. To do this:
STEP 1 Use IMAGEX to apply the image in copy of boot.wim to a folder, e.g
imagex /apply winpe.wim 1 c:\WinPE_x86\mount
STEP 2 Make the changes
Then copy the modified WIM then goes into the ISO\SOURCES\BOOT.WIM
Some Windows components are included but not installed with the image
These can be added with the peimg tool.e.g.
peimg /install=WinPE-HTA-Package "C:\WinPE_x86\mount"
I'd suggest using peimg /install=* if you're building a CD. You can also add drivers with the PE imageTool e.g.
peimg /inf="C:\Install Files\MyDevice\Device.INF" "C:\WinPE_x86\mount"
I tried this with a the driver for my old digital camera which isn't recognised as storage drive withouth installing a driver; the driver is Once you have tweaked the image to the way you want it you can optimize it for size with
peimg /prep
Step 3 Use IMAGEX a second time to Capture the IMAGE back to a bootable WIM file, e.g
imagex.exe " /boot /compress max /capture "C:\WinPE_x86\mount" "C:\WinPE_x86\ISO\SOURCES\BOOT.WIM " "MyNewPE"
And now you're ready for OScdIMG or copying to a USB key.
One of the tools you'll need to get to grips with if you are going to support or deploy vista is Windows PE - the pre Installation environment. In order to get a copy to work with, you need to Install the Windows Automated Installation Kit. This is keeping something of a low profile at the moment. I'll post a link to it when I have one. Kudos to Nathan Mercer who says that you can register for it on connect. I will still post a link to the release version when it breaks cover :-) It is now available here. There are 3 steps to getting a copy of PE you can use.
Copying the source files. Chose a working directory for Windows PE files, the notes I have suggest C:\WinPE_x86. Open a command prompt, go to the where the AIK is installed, and enter the command:
Copype.cmd x86 C:\WinPE_x86
At this point you can Customize the image in the ISO subfolder of C:\WinPE_X86. I'm going to cover that separately but there are 2 things to know here. Firstly PE boots from a WIM file in the BOOT folder this contains Windows itself so drivers Windows options get added and removed here; once you have your WIM file it goes in the ISO\BOOT folder. Second most programs run under PE, so you can put them in ISO\Anything_you_like own folders.
The notes I have suggest the command to make the ISO folder into an ISO image is as follows. Oscdimg -n –bc:\winpe_x86\etfsboot.com c:\winpe_x86\ISO c:\winpe_x86\winpe_x86.isoI've found that this gives an error, the parameters I've found to work are
Oscdimg -n c:\winpe_x86\ISO c:\winpe_x86\winpe_x86.iso -n -bc:\winpe_x86\etfsboot.com
I.e. it goes SOURCE_FOLDER, ISO_FILE, Switches. -n allows long filenames, and -b specifies a boot sector. The tool gives a copyright date of 2000 and says it is for Microsoft internal use only.... Sigh. I don't know why we didn't include a CD burning tool either. Steve recently explained that you can get this in the Windows Server 2003 resource kit.
If you want to make a bootable USB key you use the VISTA DISKPART utility. The commands you use in diskpart are
Having done that you copy the ISO folder to the USB key
That's it. Now you have your universal tool for imaging and repairing Vista.
Updated (1) to include the link to the WAIK, and thanks to Jesper, to point out this needs the Vista version of disk part. Updated (2) Active and format had merged into one step above. Thanks Alun.Updated (3) The download link moved.
Most people, I think, know that Hamlet does not say "Alas Poor Yorick, I knew him well", and Mae West never said "Come up and see me some time". When I was active in Microsoft's private trainer newsgroups, a misquote from George Orwell would come up frequently in the form "But, Thomas, we have always been at war with Eurasia" or "But we have always been at peace with Eurasia" the nearest 1984 gets to this is this in Chapter five;"She did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia' "
And in chapter nine we get this. "On the sixth day of Hate Week... [when] the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium ... at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally."
{Side notes 1. what did we do before search engines, on-line copies of books and so on ? 2. How did I manage before IE7 made it so easy to try more than one search engine for this stuff. }
Fun though it might be to paint a picture of Microsoft as something from Orwell (it makes a change from Star Trek) give or take a little bit of Newspeak, it's not really like that. However I've been having the "We're not after all at War with Eurasia" feeling following our announcement with Novell last week. I can't quite get my head around it; yes, I get what's been announced
In one place I read that technical coopetition was supposed to include a joint facility mid-way between Provo and Redmond. Any residents of Horseshoe Bend Idaho will be overjoyed. We announced support for Suse Linux on virtual server in April; In July we announced support for ODF in July. Last month ECMA TC-45 announced the final draft of it's definition of Open XML (the native format for Office 2007) - and Novell have been on the that Committee. So only Web services management is news.
The patent issue is interesting because Microsoft customers should have that peace of mind already though Microsoft Intellectual Property Indemnification. Great for Suse customers. The conspiracy theorists have been having fun debating what drove it - did Novell have some patent(s) which could hurt Microsoft and vice versa ? Are we getting behind Novell purely to be well placed to stab them in the back ? and so on. I've no idea on either.
And then there is the issue of joint solutions. When Ray Noorda ran Novell he coined the term Coopertition to describe their relationship with us. (Until checking this I hadn't heard Ray died last month; sad news). Microsoft's Kevin Turner described this as "Shake hands but keep the other hand on your wallet". Talking of shaking hands look at the photo of Steve B and Ron Hovsepian (Novell's CEO) - who looks cheerful and who looks like they've stepped in something sticky ? Novell has been trying to re-invent itself since Ray's time (it's attempts to do so under Eric Schmidt were disastrous). Is this another reinvention? Or a realization that Ray's idea of coopertition was smart after all . Both companies would like 100% of a customer's business, but it doesn't always work out that way. If that's what the customer wants, lets give them the best experience of each of the technologies: and that means working together. Obviously Novell want their Linux solution to be used rather than another flavour, and they now have the odd position of being "Microsoft's preferred Linux". Again the conspiracy theorists would like to think this is somehow designed to isolate Novell from the rest of the Open Source players, but as a "Mixed source" company maybe they're closer to us anyhow.
I'm going to be fascinated to see how this one unfolds.
When I posted about Vista RTM (Trolls: Slain, Lake: crossed, Mountain: climbed, Vista: Released.) I said it wasn't connected with the NatWest Adverts In the current one a woman walks round town (stopping for a beauty treatment with free Coffee: I know what you pay for a haircut when the coffee is thrown in.), explaining why she's had it with her bank
"My shop - extended hours. My bank - early doors." "My cappuccino - thrown in. My branch number - thrown out." "My favourite shop - a new store. My bank - a trendy wine bar." "My Patience - exhausted. My Account, switched"
In the previous advert we had a man walking round and I can't find the script for this but it was something like
"My shop - round the clock. My bank ?" We hear his phone saying 'please try later' "clocked off""My Barber -a person. My bank ? ". We hear his phone saying 'Press 1 for ....' "A robot"The next part may have caused complaints, he looks up from a meal in a curry house. "My Indian - Local, My Bank ?" he stares at the phone "India !"
He switched banks too. I've been trying to come up with something in the same vein, because on Thursday morning my mail box was moved to Exchange 2007. Apart form the punch line of "My mail box - full. My account switched" I'm short of ideas ... if you can think of something post a comment.
As Darren pointed out this lights up some new features in outlook. He concentrated on meetings, Darren, if you're going to use that title, the meeting location needs to be "Upon the heath"... and don't forget to invite Macbeth.
I'm off to Barcelona in a few minutes, which is my first chance to use the new out of office assistant which needs Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007.
I realise that those of you who are prone to bouts of political correctness might describe me as "pro-detail" - and whose who aren't might call me a Pedantic wassname. You might register for the Exchange/Vista/Office (a.k.a EVO) Launch event perfectly happily but since I first saw the UK version of a the "Ready for a new day" graphic, it's bugged me that
(a) The London Skyline doesn't look like that (and when using artistic License licence- in the style of the old Thames TV logo -one should at least get the parts in the correct sequence - the London eye is the wrong place) .
(b) We have the Sun rising in West.
If this put anyone off registering for the event, here's how I think it should look
OK ? Now go and register !
Update, thanks to the Pedantic person who pointed out that Pedants had morphed into Pendants. [Sigh ...]
Hugh Mcleod's cartoon has a bit of a following in Microsoft, (it's only a matter of time before we see it on T-Shirts round here). I like it because I like ambiguity in pictures, slogans and the like and Hugh gives 5 possible meanings on his blog.
I've mentioned the interviews I did in Barcelona and I always think the best interview are the ones where the interviewer knows what their interviewee has to say and asks just enough to entice them into saying it, hopefully giving the interview a theme. This is why I like Midweek on Radio 4 ; which I managed to catch this morning. One of the guests was John Wood who has published a book called Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, about setting up Room to Read. For the next few days the program will be on the Radio 4 Listen Again page. John saw the need to help educate children when he visited Nepal. His choice: Go back to his job at Microsoft and forget what he'd seen, or try to change the world. Interestingly this choice Change the world, or go home (to Microsoft) is one which Hugh leaves under "and so forth".
For those who can't take such a big step as John, but feel they want to do something, have a look at DigitalPipeline, which puts old but usable PCs to use in education in the developing world. Sometimes, changing the world begins at home.
A couple of hours ago Jim Alchin, sent a mail which begins Today we are announcing the Release to Manufacturing of Windows Vista.
The first high point that Jim calls out is "This is the first time we’ve supported a broad array of product skus to help address different customer segments – and they’re all supported using a single product image. The same DVD can be used to install any of the product images." which ties in with something I posted earlier.
There are a bunch of other things in Jim's mail, including confirmation of a US launch event which the BBC had already announced. Watch this space for news of UK launch activities.
To explain the title of this post, it is not a tribute to the NatWest bank adverts which run in Britain, but to a famous mail from Brian Valentine. Back in 2005 someone asked where the mountain wallpapers came from in Vista and Brian - who was in charge of it at the time - sent this vintage reply.
Every day when I log on – I look at this nice peaceful quiet serene picture and I like to think of it as a mountain… a frickin’ mountain… a frickin’ mountain we have to scale to ship Vista…. a frickin’ mountain we have to scale to ship Vista that has a pretty little frickin’ lake in front of it… a frickin’ mountain we have to scale to ship Vista that has a pretty little frickin lake that we have to walk on water to cross in front of it so we can scale the frickin’ mountain to ship Vista… the only thing missing is a bunch of large frickin’ ogres and trolls blocking the way that we have to slay before we walk on the frickin’ water in the pretty little frickin’ lake that leads to the frickin’ mountain we have to scale to frickin’ ship Vista…
Next stop, Longhorn server, then on to Windows "Vienna".
If you are in the UK you are probably aware of the death of the Alexander Litvinenko, and the on-going investigation into some of British Airways's Boeing 767s. It appears one of these aircraft was working on the London Heathrow - Barcelona route during the week of Tech-ed IT-Forum. The flights involved are flights BA478 (from London at 07:25) and BA479 (From Barcelona at 11:35). I flew BA, but not on the affected flights. More information is available from a link on BA's Home Page, including what to do if you were on one of them.
Since it's the weekend I'm catching up on my reading ...
A few days ago I mentioned Richard Siddaway, who is setting up a Powershell user group for the UK. Somehow I failed to mention that Powershell released to the web during Tech-ed IT forum. DOH ! The www.microsoft.com/powershell will take you to the home page where there is a ton of infomation, as well the powershell Download there.
My old freind Thomas Lee dropped Eileen* a message to sat he was is also involved with the user group, and enough people have expressed an interest on his blog alone to get things started.
If you're looking for more information, the Windows server team have a great post about Powershell on their blog, with a great set of links. I've already mentioned the Powershell team's blog (or rather the presence of Jeffery Snover's transcript from IT forum there) and a quick seach on Technorati reveals several more.
* I've said a few times that I'm enjoying work more since I started working for Eileen; she's the only boss I've had who would have made the post I linked to.
About 1999 someone from Microsoft sent me a cassette tape of a talk called "Selling Consultancy services" and the guy giving the talk threw out a question.
"We and our customers both want exactly the same thing. What is it ?"
And you could hear the audience mumbling - thinking, "we want them to pay us a lot, and they don't want to". Eventually the speaker put them out of their misery.
"We both want them to have an excellent experience of our technology".
I've hung on to this ever since because it seems to be the basis of everything I have done in the computer industry. But if you reverse the statement it is also true. I don't want customers who can't have an excellent experience. Sadly some customer needs don't fit with Microsoft products, if the customer will never be happy with SQL server, better they go to Oracle, if their requirement would make them miserable on Exchange, better they have Notes and so on. The good they do a competitor by being satisfied with their product, is less than the harm they do me by being dissatisfied with mine. But, I think we all know, there are some customers who you just can't please and I'd rather they were hurting the competition.
I was reminded of this when I was reading someone's explanation for returning a (new-to-market) camera. He's not the first camera owner I've read where I've thought If "I were the camera maker, I'd pay him to go to a different brand". And before you wonder, no I don't feel that way about any of Microsoft customers I've met in the last few years.
My Colleague Mike Pallot keeps an interesting blog, which I'm slightly ashamed to say I found by accident : a recent entry got me to do a test of my "Personal DNA" which comes back with saying I'm a ...
Most of Mike's stuff is about High Performance Computing and Search. He gives a great analogy for High Performance Computing , Cray Super Computers (like the one I got access to as a student in the mid 1980s) were like race horses, Linux Clusters resemble flocks of chickens that are tough to harness, manage and configure, and Windows Compute Cluster Server is like a team of huskies. Presumably the number one dog in the team is a respectful leader too.
Hmmm. Herding Chickens ? I thought the phrase was "Like herding cats" (I love that commercial - shame it's only in qucktime). Mike says the analogy made him cry with laughter... now ... leaving the office this evening I was listening to Radio 4's PM program and I heard "A listener contacted us to say they'd found the exploding whale on You tube". If you don't know the exploding whale (the story of removing a Dead Whale with Dynamite) it takes two seconds to find it. And it makes me crry with laughter everytime.
Dreadful timing for me, because I really want to be honing the presentation I'm doing later today - but I was up late looking at this and it still feels exiting.
So here's a problem that's always bugged photographers: You can only get so much in a photo. The camera is at one point in 3D space, aimed and focused on another point in 3D space, and has a given angle of view. Now ... you can keep the camera at the same place and take pictures aimed at different points then stitch the resulting pictures together to form a Panorama (I've been pleasantly surprised what a good Digital Image Suite does stitching pictures from my phone camera) and for some time we have had tools which let you move a computer viewpoint around a large panorama. But really that only let you over come the limitation of looking at a computer screen instead of standing in front of a print. You can move the camera around a single object and stich the results together to get what I call a "peel" - which is trickier than a Panorama, but are trying to produce a continous photograph which gives you a single impression of a bigger scene.
The painter David Hockney experimented with making collages of photographs which he called "Joiners". A joiner isn't smooth,its lot of individual impressions which you also give you a single impression of a whole - even if that couldn't be seen from one view point,or different parts existed at a different times.
Although you can make Joiners and Panoramas on the computer you're not doing anything which exploits the computer as a medium - or in less pompus terms, the computer overcomes the limitation of the frame size of your camera, and it replaces pasting up prints to form a collage, but it's not a "multimedia experience" - letting you pan and zoom round an image which is too big for your screen doesn't count, sorry. Cue Photosynth. It's such a visual experience that I'm not sure I can verbalize it properly; but let me try. It takes a lot of photos of the same place (one of the Demos is St Mark's in Venice) and relates them together. The pictures can be taken from different points around the square, with different angles of view; so we couldn't make a panorama out of them; but photosynth works out where the camera was in 3D space and where the parts of the images are, in 3D space, and which pictures overlap with each other, so that you can look around the scene and get all those different impressions linked to each other so that they have a kind of context. It's not virtual reality (which is a relief) but like VR it doesn't have any kind of experience away from the interactive one on the computer... You have to try it, but be warned: it's a beta and currently it only supports recent Microsoft Browsers on Recent OS's - it needs a 5MB download to install the active X control. But it's worth it. Go there now !
Update: I had a chance to watch one of the Videos where they show this stuff in action and cover it's history a bit. Rick Szeliski from Microsoft Research talks about this as a new medium in much the way I was thinking about it above. Also look out for the book of Hockney pictures about 3 minutes in.
In a previous posting I've talked about adobe and their DNG (Digital Negative) format. I said at the time 'A few people were suspicious of Adobe's motives for DNG, but their licence "grants all individuals and organizations [the right] to make, have made, use, sell, import and distribute Compliant Implementations" '
Adobe's licence doesn't give away any patents and so on they might have but it guarantees they won't pursue a claim against someone who use their patented material to create something which implements the specification (if you use that same patented material to do something else, they can still get you).
After I posted about the VHD test drive programme I went over to see if John Howard had anything to say about it. He also had a pointer to news that VHD format had been opened up it's now covered by the Open Specification promise. I've explained that Microsoft employees aren't allowed interpret a Microsoft licence - since no-one would think we work for Adobe we can interpret their licenses :-) But I think it's a reasonable approximation to call this our equivalent of Adobe's licence for DNG. No doubt some cynics will say the same things about this as they did about Adobe and DNG
Bonus link the CTO of XenSource talks about why he thinks this is "profound".
Ed Bott at ZD net takes us to task we get things wrong - but he writes some of the best informed stuff about Vista. I'm not ashamed to admit that his page "10 tips and tweaks for Vista Experts" has two things I wasn't aware of which I will be using from now on. I'm just not going to say which two ;-)
At the moment I'm trying to finalize the content for my session in London next week entitled All You Wanted to Know About Vista Imaging, But Were Afraid to Ask, and only now do I realise what a bad idea "All you wanted to know" titles are...
I was checking something for this presentation last week when I was (nominally) on Holiday. Yes, I'm a bad father I was supposed to be looking after my daughter, and I can't switch off from work; we'd been into the office once, and I didn't want to come in to get a spare laptop. So I had a bright idea -I'd seen a list of Vista Virtual labs, so why not try those ? Now at the session I delivered in Manchester a couple of weeks ago I said how good I'd heard the labs were but I'd never tried them for real. It was worth a try.
I was very impressed. The lab content was on a par with what we had in official curriculum courseware when I used to be a trainer. You can pull down a PDF of the manual and Virtual Machine gets prepared for your use (and cleaned up afterwards) and you use the terminal Services Active X control to connect in to it. And performance over my home broadband link was great.
Eileen had the same list of labs that I had and blogged the Exchange related ones last week and the Sharepoint related ones today. Here's a list of vista related ones.