So it took me awhile, but i finally got a working BartPE setup.

But i have come across a stumbling block. Let me give some background..

At my job we require Serial(RS232) in order to perform some communications in the testing enviornment.

There are alot of machines which are being released that do not have serial ports.

So i came up with the idea of rather than requesting that harddrives always be sent or created w/ XP, why not create BartPE on a USB thumb drive and use that.

Problem is, as far as i can tell there is no support for Serial ports, onboard or USB. I attempted to communicate over the systems onboard serial port with no success, and likewise with the USB-Serial adapter.

I believe i installed the USB->Serial adapter drivers correctly, basically the .sys files into system32 and the .inf's into the INF folder...

Is it possible to install 3rd party drivers into your BartPE install? I would assume that you can but any help would be appreciated. Im hoping that this is possible..

yes, it is possible.

do you use infcachebuild ?

do you run paragliders HwPnP ?



if not, search for both, and use them.



Joshua

Ok so now i have another issue..upon reading for HWPNP & Infcachebuilder i came across XPE.
So sort of an off topic question but somewhat relevent?

So i went through the whole how-to for XPE..but the problem is now my BartPE folder is like 460Mb due to all the extra .Sys & .Dll and crap i had to extract for XPE. I am still transffering the stuff to my thumb drive(its a slow one!) but im worried that it wont be able to complete since its only a 256mb one..

But anywho, are those folders & files necessary to extract to use XPE & the Inf & HWPnP tools? I am trying to create the most simplistic version of Xp with the appropriate drivers.

Is it possible to use InfCachebuilder & HWPnP without using XPE? If so how do i go about doing that? InfCacheBuilder seems built into the XPE "Build Tools"...or do those build tools work even if you dont want to use XPE?

yes, you can use the buildscripts and HWPnP without XPE.



Joshua

@arsenic0

Which USB Serial Adapter do you use?
Do you have a driver URL?

I used a FTDI adapter in the past. This worked.

Serial ports require some sort of PNP at BartPE runtime:
a PNP plugin, Infcachebuild and HWPNP.

You don't have to add 200 mb of data.

Xpe-pnp.inf from XPE may be sufficient allone.
internal serial ports: if you lucky, you have to include Xpe-pnp.inf and HWPNP only
I'm used to use full XPE and can't answer that question.
USB Serial Adapter: add appropiate driver relating to your hardware

Use Infcachebuild at any rate.
You may use Infcachebuild without XPE plugin.

Well i finally got a working version of XPE(without all the extra crap) and the drivers are loaded.

Tommorrow at work i will see if i can actually communicate over the serial port or not..now i need to work on getting it dual booting w/ a menu But theres documentation on that..thanks for the help!