Appendix A: Building a Windows PE Boot Disk

With Windows Vista, Microsoft for the first time is making more widely available something called Windows Preinstallation Environment, or Windows PE (WinPE). WinPE is a minimal version of Windows designed to be booted from read-only media such as a CD. It was available to certain customers and OEMs previously, but with Windows Vista, Microsoft is making it freely downloadable.

WinPE is one of the most useful troubleshooting tools around, and every system administrator should have a copy sitting around for handling tasks that cannot be handled using the live, running operating system. New with WinPE 2.0, the version based on Windows Vista, is that you can also boot a computer from WinPE on a USB flash drive. To build that flash drive is a bit tricky, however. This appendix contains step-by-step instructions for how.

Building a WinPE Bootable USB Flash Drive

The first step in building a bootable WinPE Flash Drive is to download the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). It is available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=.

You can also get WinPE from the Business Desktop Deployment Kit. As you may conclude from the distribution mechanisms, WinPE is actually designed primarily to be used for automated installations. In fact, when you boot a computer from the Windows Vista DVD media, you are actually booting into WinPE. The first set of screens is rendered in WinPE. If you are used to using WinPE based on Windows XP or Server 2003 you may immediately notice that those screens are graphical user interface (GUI) based, not command line interface (CLI). WinPE based on Windows XP and Server 2003 supported only CLI applications. Starting with the Windows Vista-based WinPE, many GUI applications are also supported under WinPE. This greatly expands the type of applications you can use to troubleshoot a system under WinPE.