Written from the decompiled assembly rather than from observation. Three
long-standing beliefs about this tool are wrong, and each has cost real
debugging time:
W: is not a guess. PESetup hardcodes it in nine places - every copy
destination, the DISM offline sessions, bcdboot, reagentc - and creates it
during its own disk preparation. startnet.cmd's volume finder, diskpart
reassignment and W: wait loop are machinery built around a problem that does
not exist.
The copy steps do not filter. CopyPackages copies the whole of
Deploy\Applications recursively to W:\Deploy\Applications - no manifest, no
unattend parsing, no extension or size rules. Anything dropped there reaches the
target, which is the basis for staging our own payload without the enrollment
share. It is also fail-fast: one unreadable file fails the whole step.
A missing driver match is a WARNING, not an error. GetDriverByModel does a
substring test of comma-separated tokens with first-match-wins, the family
filter knows only Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision, and a single 'virtual
platform' entry in the catalogue fails every physical machine. A miss lets
imaging finish with no drivers, so no NIC, so DNS failures at first boot -
symptoms far from the cause, and easily misattributed to the drive letter.
Includes the bundle-extraction recipe so the next person can re-derive all of
this instead of trusting this document.
