How to create a winpe boot-able USB flash drive

I was trying to automate the OS installation. And when I googled around, I could see so many links asking to play with winpe. When I explored winpe, I was amazed to see such a wonderful small image developed by Microsoft. You can say a mini windows Vista.

So what if Vista is not a hit, but because of Vista, we got such a wonderful image which makes our life much more easier.

Now to create a winpe boot-able USB, we need to have a boot-able USB drive and a winpe image.

Let me first dig into creating a boot-able USB flash drive.

Steps to follow:

Now here is how we can prepare USB Flash Drive.

Connect the flash drive to the system.

Open a command prompt and run the following command:

#> diskpart (opens the diskpartition command line utility. in case of win7 and vista, run as administrator.)

When you see the prompt "DISKPART>" type in the following command to verify which disk is the USB Flash Drive:

list disk (We should see a listing of disks based on size)

Type in the following commands (Important: this assumes that USB flash drive was listed as "Disk 1" , assuming there are only 2 disks in the system. And the boot disk is always the Disk 0.)

select disk 1

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format quick fs=fat32

assign

exit

This prepares the flash drive and just by copying the winpe files into the flash drive will complete the process of creating the winpe boot-able flash drive.

Note: Diskpart is a command line utility available in all versions of windows after windows XP.

We can also script it as below. Keep the below command in a txt file named diskpart.txt.

"list disk

select disk 1

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format quick fs=fat32

assign

exit

"

In the command prompt type below command to complete the whole process.

diskpart /s diskpart.txt