Mai 042014
 

If, like me, you often get confused with WinPE versionning, here below a quick summary :

  • WinPE 2.0 – 6.0.6000 – Vista
  • WinPE 2.1 – 6.0.6001 – Vista SP1 and possibly Server 2008
  • WinPE 3.0 – 6.1.7600 – Windows 7 and possibly Server 2008 R2
  • WinPE 3.1 – 6.1.7601 – Windows 7 SP1 and possibly Server 2008 R2 SP1
  • WinPE 4.0 – 6.2.9200 – Windows 8 and possibly Server 2012
  • WinPE 5.0 – 6.3.9600 – Windows 8.1
  • WinPE 5.1 – 6.3.9600 – Windows 8.1 Update 1

Thanks goes to Misty on reboot.pro for making this clear !

 Posted by at 16 h 58 min
Mai 042014
 

Lately I had been testing a lot Windows 8.1 and WinPE generated from Windows 8.x (i.e WinPE 4.0, 5.0, 5.1).

The Windows QEMU I had (lots of versions out there) was giving me a windows error 0x0000005d which means UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR .
Indeed, starting with Windows 8, you need a processor that supports NX/PAE/SSE2.
NX is not supported with older windows QEMU versions.
More details from MS here.

Googling around it appeared the solution was to use the -cpu command line parameter with QEMU.
Unfortunately, none of the QEMU versions I had was supported that parameter.

I then found the right (and latest) windows QEMU version (2.0.0) here.
I downloaded this version qemu-w32-setup-20140418.exe.
The command line : start qemu-system-i386.exe -L .-m 512-cdrom D:\WinPE5.1.iso-cpu Nehalem allowed me to boot my latest Windows 8.1 with success ! 🙂

Also, note the use of coreinfo (from sysinternals) to check your processor flags.

qemu_nx2

 Posted by at 16 h 56 min