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This kinda stinks.

I can boot up WD offline just fine, and it runs
Windows. In fact, it looks very like a Windows
PE package. But that’s the end of the line for me.

My PC uses a high-end ASUS motherboard with
a Marvell [RAID0] embedded controller. This
package can’t find a ‘hard drive’ (array), so
it summarily exits.

I have two gripes: one is that MS seems to
accommodate only the ‘bare-bones’ kind of
system. Even when installing Windows, the
escape process to install custom drivers is
antiquated and cumbersome. Here, it doesn’t
even exist–so I can never run this app.

[BTW: the MS site doesn’t even cover this.]

The other is really a side-issue to this: MS
makes WindowsPE and derivative products
only available to system builders. They have
steadfastly refused to release anything like
a full rescue disk; when Windows fails due
to hard drive issues, you’re in a heap of woe.

I pop in any number of Linux-based repair
boot CDs and they find Dell or Marvell disk
arrays immediately–drivers are included.
But of course they are relatively clumsy
when it comes to repairing NTFS and subtle
Windows boot errors.

Microsoft needs to make repair and recovery
tools far more available and accessible; in
my opinion they have always shortchanged us. Dave