Slow boot from WinPE 4.0

Putting this in the Win8 forum, as there doesn't seem to be one for Server 2012 deployment.

I am currently automating deployment of a Server 2012 customised image, but am getting very poor performance when booting off WinPE 4.0 on physical servers only.

I have the following comparisions:

1. Boot WinPE 3.0 on an HP DL380 Gen 8 using an ISO made with WAIK and mounted via iLo remote board - takes a couple of minutes max.

2. Boot WinPE 3.0 or 4.0 on a VMware version 8 guest running on vCenter 5.0 using an ISO made with WAIK/WADK and mounted via vmware console - takes a minute.

3. Boot WinPE 4.0 on the same HP DL380 Gen8 using an ISO made with WADK and mounted via iLo remote board - takes 15-20 minutes.

Typically all of the above images only have drivers for NIC and storage controllers for the approriate WinPE version, however I have also tried putting all Server 2012 drivers from the HP Service Pack for Proliant into the WinPE 4.0 image, with no change.

The wpeinit log shows no delays, so it would seem that any delay occurs before that log is started.

Anyone have any further ideas for troubleshooting?


  • Edited by Clockhouse Tuesday, March 26, 2013 3:05 PM Changed title, as server 2012 not relevant
March 26th, 2013 6:04pm

I have not seen any significant timing difference between booting WinPE 3.0 vs 4.0, but I do all my work with PXE.

Are you using 64bit or 32bit WinPE? What is the size of your boot.wim?

Also a consideration of the memory your servers are using. As an example, 1 board can boot WinPE4 x64 with only 1GB RAM, but if I enable RAID on that board, I need at least 2GB to properly boot the image.

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March 26th, 2013 11:59pm

This is with 64bit WinPE and the boot.wim is 173,279,097 bytes (so let's say 169MB).

By comparison, the WinPE 3.0 boot.wim is 141,033,108 bytes (say 137MB).

The HP server has 64GB RAM and RAID is enabled.

The VMware server has 2GB RAM.

March 28th, 2013 3:19pm

I will try with PXE once our Bladelogic environment (not within my control) is upgraded to cope with WinPE 4.0.
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April 11th, 2013 12:11pm

Well that should certainly be enough memory to boot a wim of that size. The wpeinit.log only logs things after wpeinit.exe is executed. It has no knowledge of the phases prior, either the initial loading phase, or the one between that and when the "wallpaper" shows up. I see you mention using ISOs, are these using physical CD/DVDs or are you using an ISO mounter? Have you also tried putting your WinPE 4 on a USB key?
April 12th, 2013 11:38pm

We're expieriencing the same problems when trying to boot a Symantec System Recovery 2013 emergency boot disk (which is WinPE 4 based) on a DELL PowerEdge R720 .

Same disk runs fine on a PowerEdge R610.

We also tried to include various drivers but nothing helped.

Additionally we tried to play around with some BIOS settings with did not work either:
- enable/disable VT (virtualization support)
- enable/disable NX bit (executiion prevention)
- UEFI or BIOS boot


Any idea is very welcome!

Thanks, Christian

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August 20th, 2013 1:58pm

Well, I finally got around to troubleshooting some more. Being convinced it was a driver issue I took out the drivers and booted in the same manner. Of course it bluescreened, but it took a while before it did so, so it looked like the same issue.

So then I took Tripredacus' advice and used a USB stick with my original ISO image extracted on it, went across to the data centre and it only took a few minutes to boot WinPE 4.0 from USB.

Thus it seems to be a problem with WinPE 4.0 booting over the HP iLo interface. I will open a case with HP, but it's odd that WinPE 3.1 does not have this problem.
January 16th, 2014 10:53am

Since I've posted in this topic, I've encountered some hardware where WinPE 4 doesn't boot at all or boots to BSOD. The "workaround" so far has been to use WinPE 5.0 boot images made from the Windows 8.1 ADK. We do have cases open with the hardware manufacturers of these products, however they seem to resist fixing it and just say use WinPE 5.0. :\

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January 16th, 2014 11:33am

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