No internet connection
  1. Home
  2. Technical Support

Using WinPE to Image via a WIM

By Tyler Pierce @piercetyler37
    2024-05-03 16:18:45.260Zassigned to
    • @david

    Good afternoon!

    My company purchased a TinyPilot for testing. We are looking at deploying these to machines in our customer's production environments. (Minimum of 2 TinyPilots per site, hundreds of sites)

    I would like to have the option for the USB virtual media act more like a physical USB drive. Is this possible? Or is there some way to work around this?

    I can boot into our custom WinPE ISO (this is a very small ISO). We then have a custom WinPE Imaging utility for applying WIM images. Once I'm booted into WinPE, I can unmount the ISO since it is loaded into RAM. I then mount the WIM image as a USB or CD-ROM, and I can see the device in our imaging utility, but cannot see the WIM Image.

    Looking further, if I try to cd into the drive, cmd reports "The volume does not contain a recognized file system."

    Reply
    • 3 replies
    1. David @david2024-05-06 14:31:59.382Z

      Hi @piercetyler37, I'm sorry you're running into this issue installing Windows with WinPE and a WIM image.

      I would like to have the option for the USB virtual media act more like a physical USB drive.

      Can you explain what you mean here? As far as I understand, in Flash Drive mode, TinyPilot acts as a USB drive.

      Could you explain what you expect to see if you used a physical USB device when trying to install Windows using the WinPE image and the WIM image?

      Reply
      1. P
        In reply topiercetyler37⬆:
        Tyler Pierce @piercetyler37
          2024-05-10 01:41:56.270Z

          Hi David,

          We would like to see the Flash Drive Mode have an option to present the flash drive as a NTFS drive with the WIM file.

          In the current method of Flash Drive Mode, I'm not sure exactly how the virtual USB device is passed through, but it is not readable by windows. Because we would be imaging units via WIM images from WinPE, the virtual USB device would need an option to pass through in a format that windows can read & access.

          Thank you!

          Reply
          1. David @david2024-05-10 18:48:28.665Z

            Thanks for the details, @piercetyler37!

            From my understanding, I don't think TinyPilot supports this particular use case right now. TinyPilot mounts images (usually ISO images) as a drive or CD-ROM, rather than mounting as a drive containing the file, unfortunately.

            I've created an internal ticket to look into this a little more. It's not part of our short-term roadmap yet, but we’re always working to improve TinyPilot’s software and hardware. We prioritize features based on user demand, so we’ll definitely consider your feedback in our planning.

            Please let me know if you have any questions.

            Reply
          ReplyAdd progress note