Quickly Update WinPE 3.0 for AFHD Support

In case you weren’t yet aware (and many people still are not), there was a shift across the desktop computing industry to a new hard drive technology known as “Advanced Format.” You can read more about this new technology on the IDEMA AF Technology Page.

The reason this shift is significant is that WinPE 3.0, which many of us using SCCM/MDT for OS deployment are utilizing as our boot image, does not natively support the new format. The updated WinPE 3.1 available with the Windows 7 SP1 version of WAIK does support the new drives, but updating to this version creates other issues (in particular, the loss of the Windows Recovery Environment). Fortunately, Microsoft released a hotfix (KB982018) for WinPE 3.0 to add support for the new AF drives.

Hotfixes can be applied to WinPE by using DISM to mount and update the image file. If you’re like me though you may have more than one site to update the boot images for, so rather than type the same commands multiple times on each site you may wish to use the following batch file commands:

REM @echo off
echo Updating path to include dism, oscdimg, imagex
echo.
REM Make the PETools available in the path
call “D:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\pesetenv.cmd”

echo Creating temporary directories
IF NOT EXIST D:\temp MKDIR D:\temp
IF NOT EXIST D:\temp\mount MKDIR D:\temp\mount
IF NOT EXIST D:\temp\scratch MKDIR D:\temp\scratch

@echo.
@echo Mounting x86 WinPE boot image from WAIK
@echo.
imagex.exe /mountrw “D:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\winpe.wim” 1 d:\temp\mount

dism.exe /image=d:\temp\mount /ScratchDir=D:\temp\scratch /Apply-Unattend=D:\source\kb982018\x86\Windows6.1-KB982018-v3-x86.xml

imagex.exe /unmount /commit d:\temp\mount

@echo.
@echo Mounting x64 WinPE boot image from WAIK
@echo.
imagex.exe /mountrw “D:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\amd64\winpe.wim” 1 d:\temp\mount

dism.exe /image=d:\temp\mount /ScratchDir=D:\temp\scratch /Apply-Unattend=D:\source\kb982018\x64\Windows6.1-KB982018-v3-x64.xml

imagex.exe /unmount /commit d:\temp\mount

Obviously in this example WAIK is installed on the D: drive of the server, and the x86 and x64 source files for KB982018 are saved under D:\source\kb982018 in their respective subdirectories. The batch file simply creates a couple temporary directories, mounts the WinPE image, applies the hotfix, and unmounts the image, committing the changes.

Don’t forget that once you apply this hotfix you still need to update your MDT and/or SCCM boot images!

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