Deployment Solution

We just upgraded to DS 7.5 HF2, but we've seen this same behavior in the DS 7.5 as well: no HTA support, no PowerShell support, and seemingly no way to add support for either. I even loaded up bootwiz.exe and do not see it in the wizard. Is there a way to add this to WinPE4? Without expanded features....what was the point of upgrading?

May I point you at this article:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/adventures-winpe-31?om_ext_cid=biz_con_cmgr_cp_20120221_pm

Although this describes a "roll your own" version of a WinPE 3.1 boot environment, I have done much the same with WinPE 4 and the methodology is pretty much identical when it comes to loading support for HTA.  You will need to download the appropriate deployment kit from Microsoft.

You can then follow the process with the WIM generated via DS 7.5 to add support for HTA, etc. The script section for HTA support is at the beginning, ie

C:
CD "C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools"
call copype.cmd x86 c:\winpe_x86
dism.exe /Mount-Wim /WimFile:c:\winpe_x86\winpe.wim /index:1 /MountDir:c:\winpe_x86\mount
dism.exe /image:c:\winpe_x86\mount /Get-Packages   '(note - this line lists the packages already present)
 

pause
 
dism.exe /image:c:\winpe_x86\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:"C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-hta.cab"
dism.exe /image:c:\winpe_x86\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:"C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\en-us\winpe-hta_en-us.cab"

As for powershell support, it may well be provided by one of the other packages, such as the scripting package, but as I can't recall this for sure, check the documentation that comes with the Microsoft download.

I suspect the reason that these support packages have been left out of the Symantec DS 7.5 version of WinPE is that each package adds to the size of the boot .WIM file and consequently the size of the download required to kick off imaging.

Thanks guys. I did end up following your instructions and I was succesful in adding the packages to the .wim file. When I let Altiris rebuild the pxe image (or when I create a new one with bootwiz), for some reason the ghost file is included now! So the boot.wim is over 7GB :(. So I'm trying to put back the old winpe.wim file and rebuild the pxe environment, but I have no idea how why it's it's trying to include the ghost file.