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I'm trying to install windows7 x64 to a desktop with damaged optical drive. I have a laptop with windows7 x64 on which I'm trying to run a TFTP server for network booting of windows7 to my desktop. I had setup the tftpd.exe application and successfully booted to Win PE Environment on my desktop. The desktop now displays the command-line PE environment. It went fine till here.

Now the real problem started. I shared the Windows installation foler mounted from laptop and when I tried to access the network path it gave me the error "Cannot find the path specified".

I tried pinging each others' IP addresses. Ping from PE to laptop gave the error code 1231 whereas ping from laptop to PE gave the error "host unreachable".

Then I did ipconfig in PE. The command outputs nothing. Its likely that my network adapter is not recognized by PE environment. My Network card is "Atheros AR8132 pcie fast ethernet" which is on Gigabyte G31M-ES2C board.

I followed this link to setup the network boot. And the PE image that I used was a vista one.

Now please suggest me some possible solutions.

  • Can I make PE to recognize my network adapter?
  • I had 2 hard disks in desktop. Can i unpack the win7 installation files to a drive on 2nd hard disk and access win7 setup.exe from PE environment? Is it possible , how? Here I need to partition 1st hard disk.
  • Can i unpack win7 setup files to a usb drive and access setup.exe from PE environment?

1 Answer 1

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You probably need to create a WinPE image which integrates drivers for your network card.

This tutorial shows you how to do this : DISM Tool – WinPE 3.1 Boot Environment. Step 5 is where the magic happens.

As for the drivers themselves, you can get them from the excellent DriverPacks website. By adding the content of the DriverPacks LAN package, your new WinPE image should have no trouble recognizing your network card.

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