Category Archives: WAIK

WAIK Beta Oddities

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In the last post I talked about a first look at Microsoft’s MDT 2010 Beta 2.

My inplace upgrade from Beta 1 “apeared” to be successful. However when I went to update the deployment share, I received the following error:

Update Deployment Share - Failed

Update Deployment Share - Failed

This appears to be caused by a directory structure change in the WAIK between Beta and RC. Uninstalling WAIK, and resinstalling with the RC version will resolve this, but which version is the RC version? The WAIK RC is available from here as per Michael’s recent post

I have two ISO’s that I’ve downloaded recently from Microsoft:

en_windows_automated_installation_kit_x86_x64_ia64_dvd_349519.iso
KB3AIK_EN.iso

So according to the filename on the link on Michael’s blog I should be using KB3AIK_EN.iso. Except that this is the one that I did install when I built the server for MDT Beta 1.

Looking at the readme.htm in both ISO’s provides no clue either as neither are clearly marked as Beta or RC. Using Orca from the MSI SDK 4.5 I took a look at the ProductVersion and ProductName from the Property Table in the wAIKAMD64.msi. The values were the same for both:

ProductVersion = 2.0.0.0
ProductName = Windows Automated Installation Kit

In the end the only way I able to differenciate them was by the PackageCode in the Summary Information Stream:

Beta = {7FB35EC9-03A9-49AF-B0A1-81BDBA3949F5}
RC = {3BD5A1BF-F520-4BAA-9C7E-FAA12EF37AAF}

Restarting the MDT 2010 Beta 2 Workbench after the correct version of WAIK is installed, caused the following prompt:

Follow the steps as described to resolve the issue.

Follow the steps as described to resolve the issue.

I don’t know how the filenames got reversed because I’m pretty sure I didn’t rename either of the WAIK ISO’s, but it provided for an entertaining half hour!

Extending a virtual hard disk with Windows PE

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I tend to do a lot of my development work using virtualisation, usually VMware Server or Workstation. Quite often I build a VM and realise once I start using it that I need more hard disk space. It’s easy enough to slap another virtual disk in and just add another disk, but what if you just want to make the current disk bigger?

I’ve found there’s a way to do this that is quite painless, and is possible with the tools that I use daily – admittedly it doesn’t mean that you use them daily, but maybe you do: WinPE from the Windows Automation Installation Kit (WAIK), and vmware-vdiskmanager.exe which is installed as part of VMware Workstation or Server.

First of all we need to open up cmd.exe and run the following command from within the VMware Workstation/Server folder:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x

In this example, we’re going to extend the hard disk in a 2003 server VM from 8GB to 10GB:
VMware-vdiskmanager.exe Extend Example

Next, we boot the Virtual Machine with a WinPe disk. We’re not going to go into the details of preparing a PE disk now, but the documentation can be found here.

Once the VM has booted into PE, we want to use the diskpart utility.
Windows PE - Diskpart Extend example
As you can see, checking the volumes after the extend shows that we now have 10GB available for use. A reboot back into the guest OS and we’re back in business, and we didn’t even have to break out Partition Magic!