WinPE from USB on Mac

[LeightonJames]

Hi all

 

I am a complete Mac Noob and everything i have learnt has been in the last 4 days through extensive and mind numbing research on the Internet. I have finally succumbed to asking for help here!!! lol

 

I have been able to create a usable version of WinPE on CD for use on a colleagues Mac. I know that Macs don't natively support USB Booting however i have managed to get my USB Deivce recognised at boot through the use of rEFIt. Couple this with a grub.efi loader and i should be able to boot a windows installation from my USB device (yes/no).

 

Everything i have tried so far has failed miserably with the following error:

 

cannot load image

 

From this i can see that rEFIt and Grub are working together but i am unable to load my WinPE installation. does anyone have any ideas how i can get this working or if it is even possible. (I am not afraid to try complex things as long as they are written clearly!!!)

 

Thanks

 

Leighton

[mac_shinobi]

deploy studio

[LeightonJames]

thanks, but deploy studio is not what i am after. I need a way to boot from usb so that we can use diagnostic tools through winpe without having to burn a new disc everytime we update it.

[mac_shinobi]

if your memory storage device ( ext hard drive or w/e ) uses firewire you can do it that way from what I can gather would be interesting to find out how to though so will be googling now lol

[LeightonJames]

no firewire here unfortunately. standard 4gb USB Pen Drive

[mac_shinobi]

apple have there own diag disc

 

https://support.apple.com/techtooldeluxe/main?id=dl

 

will stop posting unless I find something ref usb booting on mac for diagnostics etc

 

You may be able to grab a copy of the above disc - make the usb drive bootable and then shove all the stuff from the above iso / cd onto the usb drive and do it that way ?

 

edited

 

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1948

Edited February 9, 2010 by mac_shinobi

[Arthur]

Perhaps booting WinPE over the network via PXE might be an easier option? You can download a pre-configured version someone has created from here (found it via this website). I've used it and it works perfectly (make sure you read the instructions exactly though).

[sted]

Perhaps booting WinPE over the network via PXE might be an easier option? You can download a pre-configured version someone has created from here (found it via this website). I've used it and it works perfectly (make sure you read the instructions exactly though).

 

can you pxe boot a mac?

[pscott]

You can install from a USB CD Drive on a mac using refit, But I haven't succesfully installed from USB stick yet as the USB Drive must be formatted as mac drive (Snow Leopard install's perfect from USB Drive)

[LeightonJames]

even if you could pxe boot a mac, our network admins won't allow us access to the servers to setup the session. we are just lowly technicians!!!!

[Marci]

What particular diagnostic tools are you wanting to use?

[LeightonJames]

truecrypt, recuva, password reset tools, hdd diagnostic tools. All the tools we need to use are for the windows partition on the mac hence the need for WinPE. I apologise, maybe i should have mentioned previously about the windows partition. We are also wanting to try and use ghost through this method as winclone is not proving too succesful.

 

i am using a copy of livexp that i have created using winbuilder.

[sted]

you can dump files from pe builder as .wim files and boot them via wds/pxe boot as i do to ghost pcs

 

have you tried ghost on a mac as for images i decided to give it a wide berth as im not 100% sure what it will image or what affect it may have on the drive partition table and the ability to boot osx. What issues are you having with winclone as it seems fine when ive used it

[LeightonJames]

when winclone is used it is reporting that the image does not fit on the partition even though it is the same size as the original partition.

 

we are just going to experiment with ghost via livexp as in theory it should work!

[Arthur]

can you pxe boot a mac?

You should be able to, since isn't that how DeployStudio works?

 

That thing I linked to uses tftpd32 which can also be setup to act as a DHCP server. However, this would only be worth trying if you can run it on a separate network/VLAN from the other DHCP server since it would cause problems otherwise.

Edited February 9, 2010 by Arthur