Jul 07 2008

Vista PE Boot Disk

Published by Jason M at 10:22 pm under Computers

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I think it is great that Microsoft provides a limited edition of their kernel free for a Pre-boot environment. It is a great troubleshooting tool. Microsoft has provided the PE disk since Windows XP, but it was at one time only available to OEM’s. This disk will work with all versions of Windows and even other OS’s, as long as it has a file system that is readable by Vista. I just got done using a PE disk on a unbootable machine (wouldn’t even finish loading in Safe Mode) at a customer to restore the registry from a System Restore point. Works like a charm.

Below are the instructions on how to create a Windows Vista PE disk.

  • Next you will use the “copype” command to create the Win PE structure based on the processor architecture that you have, x86 or AMD64. In this case I am using the “copype x86 c:\windowspe-x86″ command.
  • The resulting output of the “copype” command will generate a folder structure under C:\windowspe-x86. In this folder will be the necessary files to make a bootable ISO file or a WIM image file that can modified and deployed with ImageX. In this case we will just create a bootable ISO image file.
  • The command that can be used to generate the ISO file is “OSCDIMG -bc:\windowspe-x86\etfsboot.com -n -o c:\windowspe-x86\iso C:\windowspe-x86\win_pe.iso”. The -b option specifies the path to the file containing the boot sector. The -n option allows file names longer then the DOS 8.3 format. The -o option is used to optimize the amount of space used by encoding duplicate files only once. The command will generate a bootable Windows Vista PE disk in the C:\windowspe-x86\win_pe.iso location. You can then burn this ISO to CD using any of your favorite CD burning software packages, like Nero, Roxio, etc.
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