I just wanted to share my findings and ask a question regarding remote controlling a windows recovery environment. It is possible to gain remote control of Win RE with a bit of work, firstly I need this solution because we have a lot of users on the road who are not converse with performing actions in the Win RE but they do have internet connectivity via their mobile phones, so I thought it would be useful if I were able to control their environment and perform system restores or even complete PC recoveries. To enable remote control I have used logmein free. Load into Win RE, open a command prompt and run startnet to the start the networking environment. In my case I had a DHCP server available to assign a network address, I assume if I plugged in my mobile phone this would also work (this was done in a VM so I haven’t got everything to hand). I then had to install logmein, since this was already installed into the main windows OS all I had to do was navigate to the program files (x86) folder and change directory to the logmein folder, run the command logmein.exe install You then need to attach logmein to an account, run the logmeinsystray.exe application and connect to an account (you can also run logmeintoolkit.exe), now in my case it wouldn’t authenticate to an existing account so I had to create a new one. You also need to set the administrator password for the Win RE environment or logmein can’t connect if the user account has a blank password, so type net user administrator <yourpassword> You can now remote control the Win RE session from the web using logmein. My big question though is this: Once you restart Win RE it appears the installation, network services etc are all lost. How can I customise my Win RE to keep these settings and deploy them out to my machines? This would be so useful, why Microsoft disables the remote desktop system in this I don’t know! thanks Steve

Hi Steve, Before going further, I would like to verify what the Win RE you mentioned? If it refers to Windows Recovery Environment, when booting into WinRE, the boot data won't be loaded. Before loading the OS, the services won't be started automatically. You could run startnet to the start the networking environment but cannot set it to start automatically. It is by design. Best Regards, Niki Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Yes Windows Recovery Environment. I thought win RE was based on Win PE, and apparently you can customise win PE... however i have no idea how to do these customisations or to the extend at which customisation is possible. is there absolutley no way that i could customise win RE to allow a remote control session either by remote assistance or remote desktop? it would be so incredibly useful!