One WinPE for multiple different installations

Question

Im building a PXE boot environment to move away from many CD's / DVD's to one organized fast source for tools and installations. I want to do some unattended Windows installations and know the way I have to go. I setup WinPE for PXE boot and it's working. I also have the needed installations files ready and can install one Windows edition this way. However I would like to be able to install different versions of Windows with one WinPE, but I would need some kind of parameter which I can pass to WinPE to choose which installation file should be used to install the system.
I was thinking about a unix like init=/some/script/to/execute.sh parameter for the WinPE kernel, but it seems like WinPE does not accept any parameter at all.
My last way would be to just show Windows Install as menu entry in the PXE menu and then wait until WinPE got loaded and started a installation script which would provide a menu with the different installations listed, but I would prefer to have everything in PXE only.
I also thought about using a file which gets read by WinPE over the net which contains some sort of Key<->Value structure to save which installation was selected at PXE selection however I would need to write from the PXE menu to a remote file system which is, as far as I know, not possible.

Does anyone have a better idea?

Answer 1

I realize this is an old question and may not be relevant for OP, but I ran into a similar situation a few weeks ago, and this is the solution I'm using:

For the PXE server, I'm using iPXE, mainly because of a utility called wimboot, which, besides allowing you to boot directly into a WIM image, allows you to "patch" in additional files that appear within the WinPE virtual filesystem. I'm using this to pass in configuration files for a custom installer script, but you could simply pass in whatever unattend.xml, and WinPE will use it to install any install image you want.

Answer 2

What you are trying to do is pretty complex to create and a nightmare to maintain. Microsoft already does it in RIS, WDS, MDT, and SCCM. Serva also does it implementing simpler versions of MS RIS and WDS (I'm related to Serva development).