Well after a few hardware failures at work and many hours rebuilding servers that are *supposed* to have RAID 5 on them, I’m back online.
(They had RAID enabled at the BIOS level, and there’s a BIOS boot based tool that let’s you create/delete stripes etc. BUT you need to use the ‘Windows’ version of their tool to ‘REPAIR’ the volume. Now if you can’t boot to an O/S….here in lies my problem… I want to plug the new drive in and ‘boom’ rebuild done… but no!)

I wanted to share a tip which came out of all of this – Creating a Windows 7 Boot WinPE USB Key.
You know the 20 odd things you have lying around and are wondering what you could do with 1GB, 512MB etc keys.

You can make a boot disk out of them…cool… (provided your machine supports booting from USB, unlike my mac_mini at home running Windows 7 :)
You could make an x86 boot and on another create a x64 AND you can still store your data.

It’s not too tough really – couple of things you need upfront

1. USB Key, drive or whatever
2. Windows Application Installation Kit for Windows 7 RC (WAIK) – free download with the WinPE ‘image’ in it and all the tools (a WIM file)
3. Some of your favourite recovery tools to add to your usb key

Ok good to go.

Let’s start

1. Install the WAIK on your local machine – it installs folders for x86, amd64 and i64…cool
2. From the Start Menu->All Programs->Microsoft Windows AIK->Deployment Tools Command Prompt
3. Execute the command copype x86 c:\PEBuild (replace x86 for amd64 if you want 64bit. This will create the directory c:\PEBuild and copy the required files to get started.
   
4. You’ll notice now that you should be in the C:\PEBuild folder – this is our ‘working space’ and there will be a couple of sub-directories here.
   
5. Let’s mount the Image so we can manipulate files, and then later save them back into the Image for deployment, as follows:
1. run the command imagex /mountrw winpe.wim 1 mount (this will mount the vanilla winpe.wim and create a ‘mount’ directory for us to use)

- this didn’t work for me on 2 machines that I tried as follows (I was pretty happy)


if this works for you – then great, it’s meant to. (there maybe open files etc)

Fortunately I had a PLAN B that works regardless (alot of the documentation use ImageX)

Issue the command from the C:\PEBuild dir: dism /mount-wim /wimfile:winpe.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\PEBuild\Mount


2. Go to the Mount Directory to see several folders – if you used my PlanB approach you can store the files in Program files if you like, or wherever. If you need access to the Startup folder it’s hidden in the same dir as Program Files.
   
   Copy your Win32/64 tools and utilities here to the mount dir (once fully booted up with WinPE, you will be in a RamDisk with the drive letter of X: – good idea to always use environment vars to get special folders if you need to)
   
   You can add other support like scripting, powershell etc – check out the packages
   
3. Once done – commit the changes to the WinPE.wim with the command
1. ImageX Cmd: imagex /unmount /commit /c:\pebuild\mount
2. dism Cmd: dism /unmount-wim /moundir:c:\pebuild\mount /commit
   
   
4. Almost done :)
   
5. Copy the now *modified* WinPe.Wim image file to the correct directory (and we rename) so it runs smoothly in the boot sequence. Run copy /y winpe.wim iso/sources/boot.wim
   
6. (optional step) To create an ISO of your work, issue the following command:
   ocsdimg –n –b”c:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\boot\etfsboot.com” c:\PEBuild\ISO c:\PEBuild\WinPE.iso
   
7. Next let’s add our good work to our USB key and we’re done (WE WILL ERASE YOUR KEY – back it up if needed. you can copy your stuff back on when we’ve finished)
1. Plug your USB key in and we’re going to ntfs format it, create an active primary partition and assign a drive letter to it.
2. From your command prompt use diskpart as follows:
1. c:\PEBuild\diskpart
2. list disk (you should see your USB drive come up in the list – this is the drive # to work with e.g. 1)
3. sel disk 1 (double check from the previous command on what disk number your USB is on – mine is 1)
4. clean
5. create part primary
6. sel part 1
7. format fs=NTFS QUICK
8. assign
9. exit
10. viola! your usb is now prepared.
    
8. We need to do 2 final steps – copy everything within the ISO directory straight to your USB key. e.g. c:\PEBuild\ISO (from Explorer you’ll be able to get to your USB Key easily through the SendTo right mouse menu)
   
   Take note of your USB Key’s DRIVE letter
   
9. Write the ‘bootsector’ as follows:
1. c:\program files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\bootsect /nt60 <drive letter of your USB Key>

Hopefully I’ve saved you some time and pain….. happy booting….

Great news folks with the Adapter pack now released.

This is a WCF .NET based set of ‘adapters’ that can be used within BizTalk or in any .NET process – such as SharePoint.
(The visual studio extensions allows you to rapidly create a WCF based Service to host your adapters)

The Adapter pack has:
- SQL Adapter (faster, newer, improved… bionic adapter)
- Siebel
- SAP
- Oracle DB
- Oracle ES

Here’s the links that you’ll need…… – enjoy!

More Variation support, more standard document support, more bug fixes and an upgrade checker (to make sure you can apply SP2)

Should keep those sites happier for longer…

Details from http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/23/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-available-today.aspx

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office system available today!

We're pleased to announce the release of all languages for Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, the 2007 Microsoft Office servers, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. As promised, this post contains a list of the products that are patched by SP2 with their corresponding knowledge base articles, information on how to obtain the packages, and links to additional SP2 resources. We hope you'll find this to be one of the best service packs produced by the Office team ever!

How to obtain SP2

Recommended Method: Microsoft Update

We recommend using Microsoft Update to apply SP2. Microsoft Update's detection will determine the products and languages you have installed and update your machine all at once.

Optional Method: The Download Center

If you choose not to use Microsoft Update, the SP2 packages are available for download from the Microsoft Download Center. Please click here to find links to the downloads.

Down at BizTalk 24*7 Saravana Kumar has been working hard to organise a whole collection of BizTalk articles from us in Cyberspace

He's done a great job!

Check it out - http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/
and yours truly is here - Mick Badran

Some great articles around Business Rules, AS2, EDI, Pipeline Components and promoting properties…..

Download your copy now http://biztalkhotrod.com/Documents/BizTalk_HotRod_Issue6_Q2_2009.pdf

As I’m looking into sizing up systems currently for a project, the question that you always ask “Is my CPU choice any good?” “Should I go Dual Quad Core or Quad Dual Core?”… and the questions just keep on coming, even in your sleep sometimes

I recently came across a gem of a site that gave me all my answers. There’s a bunch of other CPUs and options available also. Check it out.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=%5BDual+CPU%5D+Intel+Xeon+E5420+%40+2.50GHz

Well folks, hot on the heels of the MMA Contender Series....here's another Series which I'm sure will cause a stir.

Check out part#1 and part#2 below

Hi guys,

If you're looking to get into how to host WCF Services on Azure, showing some cool graphics, then these samples are for you.

Silverlight v3.0 (beta), and important samples showing how to take your existing WCF Services and hosting/housing them in Auze (there's a few gotchas - and these samples have work arounds :) )

Grab them here -

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wcfazure

Yep - hot off the press thanks to Stephen a friend of mine (who brought this to my attention)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

Don't leave home without it.