Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: winpe, winre, bootable | Themes: Windows Tech Talk, Software
4. Prepping Your UFD
For this job, I’ll haul out the first UFD I ever bought: a venerable FujiFilm 256 MB UFD that’s at least 10 years old.
Inside the PETools command window, you’ll invoke the diskpart utility, then issue the sequence of commands shown in the next sequence of screenshots, except you must be very careful to select the disk number that corresponds to your UFD. This is easier than you might think as these commands will illustrate:
- 1. After you insert the UFD in your system and it becomes visible to Explorer, type "diskpart" into the command window. After that, type “list disk” to list the disks that the utility recognizes by number and size. Note that Disk 4 is only 244 MB in size—obviously, it’s our target here. Your UFD should be equally easy to identify. If in doubt, remove all other UFDs from your system so only one small-capacity device appears in this list. Select that disk by number, so in this case type "select disk 4."
- 2. Next, you’ll wipe that disk clean, create a primary partition of a size no larger than what’s listed in the Size entry, select that partition, and make it active. See the screenshot for precise syntax.
- 3. Finally, you’ll format this disk for the Fat32 file system, assign it a drive letter, then exit the diskpart utility. Warning: even on small UFDs this format operation can take a while (the bigger it is the longer it takes).
- 4. To create your bootable Windows PE image on the UFD, you must now copy the ISO directory inside c:\winpe_x86 over to this pristine flash drive. The following xcopy command does this job nicely (use Windows Explorer to make sure you reference the correct drive letter all the way at the end of this command, which in this case is drive J:, although yours will probably differ):
We shot the first and last bits of this final xcopy command because it was too long to show in total. Note that the file named boot.wim is stored in the \sources\ directory—this becomes important in our next exercise. For now, please understand that this is the Windows image you created using the copype.cmd command at the very beginning of this exercise. This contains the entire WinPE 2.0 environment, but does not include the System Recovery Options we depicted in the screenshot that kicks off this story.
- Previous page Creating the WinPE image
- Next page Creating and Managing the WinRE Image...
What, no mention of BartPE or UBCD4Win (Ultimate Boot CD for Windows)? These are two projects that are vastly superior to Microsoft's method (both are built on WinPE but have expanded capabilities) and are far easier to use.
Nice guide. Never knew about it. Thanks.
when I saw this I thought it was going to be a review of Bart's PEBuilder... It's saved my a$$ many times. Far superior to WinPE...
How about a comparison/companion article? or an article on tools gearheads & techies find indespensible?
Vista's PE is far more advanced than XP's. The BartPE project is based of XP's PE. Barts is amazingly useful and I can't wait till they move to from PE 1.1 to PE 2.0.
Some "fairly new" systems will not boot from usb so always carry a cd version as a backup.
"I usually grab Imagex.exe and the Package Manager using the commands shown in the next screen capture."
Hmmm... I don't see a 'next screen capture' showing the commands used to get imagex and Package Manager.
Good start to the guide until you get to the WinRE. In section 5, step 2, you describe using imagex and the secret is the number 2 argument however you do not give an example of the command. In the WinPE you use a 240 MB partition, then in WinRE you state you need at least 512 MB.
Show us howto "use imagex to grab the Windows RE image from the Vista-installation media." Thanks.
Yes please follow up on the last few comments, I am stuck in that spot.
Thanks.
Good article, but it makes a few omissions and goofs here and there.
1. For using imagex to grab the WinRE image, check out this link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/archiv [...] -waik.aspx
2. "x64" won't work when you're using copype.cmd - it has to be "AMD64". Just replace all instances of x64 with AMD64 in this procedure, and it'll work.
3. For the image showing how to grab imagex and the package manager, click on the picture above the text to open up the gallery, then click one pic forward.
thanks suigi!
There's another option I've found to be a lifesaver for disaster recovery. I can't afford to lose access to my business laptop, but I also am lazy and tend not to back things up, so I do 3 things:
1. I synchronize two laptops using Microsoft's free Windows Live Sync. This synchronizes specified folders, even through firewalls. I used to use FolderMatch or Syncback SE manually, but Live Sync is completely automated and works over the internet or home network. This makes sure I always have two copies of my data. It also protects against laptop hardware failures to some extent, although since I don't have all the exact applications on both computers, it's not a complete solution.
2. To protect against outright disk failures and boot problems, I always clone my laptop drive. It's cheap insurance for $50 for a 120GB drive. Use DriveClone (drive must be the same size) or Acronis (can size partitions down or up) and make a clone of your "golden" image. Typically, this is a "virgin" install of all my apps, with updates. I keep the clone in a safe place, and if I ever have a disaster, I just pop the virgin drive in, and recover my data from my backup laptop.
3. For email, which contains a lot of my critical data, I use our corporate Exchange server which automatically gets backed up. Because we have size limits, I keep my own archive instead of relying on Exchange. At the end of the year on New Years Eve, I take my entire Inbox, Sent Items, Calendar, and Contacts for the year and store them to a shared Live Sync folder. This keeps my .OST file down to a manageable size, and keeps my infrequently accessed archives in a safe place.
I may have to try this, just to see how it compares to the product I just purchased... Active@Boot Disk. It's basically the same idea, but a lot easier and it comes with some tools that look very handy, including a password changer, disk-clone, etc. I'm not advertising for them, I only just installed it yesterday. Typical Murphy's-law kind of thing, right after I buy something, I find a free version. I suspect the free version wouldn't eventually have given me what I wanted, but I'm wondering after reading some of your comments, how would I install an application to the PE version? I tried on one app and since there's no registry to change, I get an error. I recall reading somewhere about how to get around that, but don't remember where.
Great article, can't wait to try it out. Always nice having multiple ways of doing a similar task. Often one tool won't work for some reason, where another one does just what you need it to.