BartPE, wzclite and fbwf..oh my!
I had struggled for months to create a BartPE build that would also have wifi connectivity, but to no avail. BartPE would load the driver for my wireless NIC card and I would go into the Device manager and see it sucessfully loaded, but could not get wzclite to start without this error: "The I/O operation has been aborted because of either a thread exit or an application request" after providing ndisuio.sys and wzcsvc.dll upon request from the running wzclite program*.
Turns out though that, unless you include the FBWF plugin (File Based Write Filter - which can be downloaded here: http://www.drowaelder.de/winpe/PEIndex.htm ) wzclite won't start. After getting this problem ironed out every thing worked fine.
Keep in mind, however, that copying the FBWF folder from the unzipped FBWF.zip, to the pebuilder3110a\plugins folder alone is still not enough (and I think this is where most people give up or otherwise become frustrated). It is also vital that you copy fbwf.sys and fbwflib.dll to the \plugins\fbwf\files folder of PEBuilder or the FBWF plugin enablement process in PEBuilder will fail!
Fbwf.sys and fbwflib.dll can be found in the 'Windows 7 install DVD\sources\boot.wim . There are plenty of Win 7 install dvd .iso torrents online for this. You can download imagex for free, install it and then use it to 'undisk' the windows image file to get the files.
Dont forget:
1. to edit the wczlite configuration settings.inf script (look inside wzclite\files folder) to include your: SSID, network key, authentication and encryption information under [auto add]
2. to copy your wireless nic driver folder (or at least [driver file name].sys and .inf) files to the \PEBuilder3110a\Drivers\Net folder BEFORE the build.
3. unlike linux ubuntu 10.10 Live CD or Hirens BCD, which are great 'jump in and drive' offline rescue cds that feature wifi connectivity and nearly every NIC [driver file name] driver imaginable, BartPE is not only time consuming to build but also a bit of a pain to setup. Personally, after the bartpe wallpaper and gold nugget start button appear, I like to begin by clicking start-->system-->taskmanager-->new-->browse-->highlight and click xpelogon (if you've added Sherpya's xpe 1.07 plugin wich is a must). After xpe fully loads only then will you see any desktop icons or quicklaunch bar (bummer that NU2 never tells you this, so you have to experiment by trial and error to find out). then I click start-->system-->fbwf and set it for 64MB. Then start wzclite and then finally network configuration utility.
* to find the requested ndisuio.sys and wzcsvc.dll files, ignore the part in the window that pops up where it tells you to insert the Installation floppy 2 and just click 'browse' then navigate the drives under 'Computer' then select x:BartPE\i386\Windows\System32\drivers and \Windows\System32, respectively to find those files. Rem: drivers are almost always a .sys file so you wont find them with all the .dll files in the System32 main folder. Instead you'll find those in System32\Drivers subfolder and you'll find driver .Inf files in the Inf cache \Windows\inf).
