Bart’s Blog

I ran into trouble booting a Dell Precision M4500 and a Dell Latitude E6510 with my WinPe x64 boot image. My boot image was loaded with the network drivers from the WinPE drivers .cab from the Dell site ftp://ftp.dell.com/sysman/Dell-WinPE-Drivers-A02.CAB, but I didn’t get connected to the network. Great repository by the way if you’re installing [...]

My quick cheat sheet for editing my customized SCCM boot image. These commands mount the bootimage, add some drivers and create an ISO image: “C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\Servicing\dism” /mount-wim /wimfile:c:\winpe_build\ISO\sources\boot.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\mount “C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\Servicing\dism” /image:c:\mount /add-driver /driver:c:\temp\parallelspd40_net /recurse /forceunsigned “C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\Servicing\dism” /unmount-wim /mountdir:c:\mount /commit “C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\oscdimg” -n -bc:\winpe_build\etfsboot.com c:\winpe_build\ISO c:\temp\customboot.iso

Use this procedure if you ever need a mandatory profile for your W2K8 remote desktop servers or Windows 7 based “appstations”. create a profile share on the fileserver (eg. \\server\profileshare$). Configure sharelevel security: Domain admins (FC) Authenticated users ‘(R) Create a local user on the server that will be used to create and customize the [...]

If you use Windows Search Server 2008 or MOSS 2007 as an enterpise search solution than you can easily use this search engine via Vista search or Windows desktop search. To integrate your enterprise search in Vista configure the policy Instant Search policy setting via local policy (gpedit.msc) or Active Directory GPO.     Or [...]

Having trouble uninstalling an application via control panel? In that case you can try the “Windows installer cleanup utility”.

  When trying to create a Vista reference image via an SCCM Operating System install package, my Task Sequence kept failing on the “Configuring Windows and ConfigMgr” task. Vista setup returned “error 31″ (boot critical device driver issue).  The setupapi log showed that the system was failing on ICH7USB.INF. Apparently the driver references USBUI.DLL. This [...]

You can download hotfixes from the Microsoft hotfix self-service site if you know the related KB number. Use following URL format: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=KBNumber&kbln=KBLanguage Example: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=958011&kbln=en-us

  If you need to remove sync partnerships with systems that are no longer available, or if you want to recover from a corrupt CSC cache then you can use the following procedure to re-initialize the offline cache. Locate the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\CSC Point to New, and then click Key. Type Parameters in the [...]

User account control is one of Vista’s interesting new security features. It offers so much more than the (for some anoying) elevation prompt when administrative privileges are required.   Many administrators disable UAC but this also disables all underlying technology: Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) User Interface Privilege Isolation (UIPI) Internet Explorer protected mode Virtualization Installer [...]

Windows Powershell delivers a shell environment where you can use a bunch of different objects (WMI, COM, .NET framework) and their methods and properties from a command prompt. The shell provides strong output formatting and redirection. Finally you won’t have to switch to Perl anymore to make use of stuff like regular expressions. As a [...]