Preapring Windows PE to Boot from a USB Thumb Drive

Posted on November 20th, 2007 by Jason

These steps will take you through preparing a USB ram drive (thumb drive, pen drive, or how ever you care to refer to it) so that you may use it to boot your Windows PE image without the need of a hard drive (or bootable CD/DVD). These steps assume you have already generated your Windows PE folder structure where you would typically burn it to an ISO image.

1) Run diskpart from command prompt running as administrator (right click the command prompt icon and choose “Run As Administrator”)

2) Type the command: list disk to see the available disks and note the one that represents your USB thumb drive

3) Select the disk: select disk # where # is the disk you determined in the above step

4) Now that the proper disk is selected, prepare it with the clean command by typing clean

5) Now create a partition on the clean drive by typing: create partition primary

6) Select the new partition by typing: select partition 1

7) Set the partition as active by typing: active

8 ) Format the partition as FAT32 by typing: format fs=fat32

9) Assign the new partition by typing: assign

10) Type exit to quit diskpart

Now you are ready to copy the files. The location from which you want to copy the files is the folder created which would normally serve as the contents of your ISO file. For example: c:\images\winpe\iso

Typically this file will contain three folders and a file: directories: boot, EFI, and source. file: bootmgr. Simply copy these files to the prepared USB thumb drive root and you are ready to go!

With the RAM drive inserted, you will either need to go into the computer’s BIOS settings at boot up and arrange the boot order to place the USB drive above the system hard drive. Alternatively most systems have a “Boot Menu” keystroke such as F12 which will let you choose the device to which you want to boot.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Computer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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5 Responses to “Preapring Windows PE to Boot from a USB Thumb Drive”

  1. MS Windows Articles, Reviews and Videos on 20 Nov 2007 at 6:53 pm #

    1) Run diskpart from command prompt running as administrator (right click the command prompt icon and choose “Run As Administrator”) 2) Type the command: list disk to see the available disks and note the one that represents your USB thumb drive(more…)

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  3. WareWolf on 09 Jan 2009 at 4:06 am #

    I have a memory card reader with a 2gb sony pro duo memory card in it, and a 2gb cruzer by sandisk.. neither of them show up in diskpart under list disk tho all my hard drives show there.

  4. Vince on 04 Feb 2009 at 4:18 pm #

    Dont work dude disk part dosent see thumb drive but keep trying!!!

  5. Joe Thompson on 06 Apr 2009 at 11:37 am #

    I was keen to use Windows PE as a disaster recovery environment, wher if a clients PC refused to work I could boot off the PE boot disk and then rescue all his files within say My Documents and put them on a USB stick. I tried various online tutorials but nothing seemed to give me this easily, when I had a brainwave!.

    If you enter the standard windows PE environment and start TWO instances of notepad, then on both open the File > Open dialogues. On the first browse to the USB Stick and on the second browse to (say) user folder and find the “My Documents” folder > now drag the “My Documents” folder and drop it into the USB dialogue browser. You can also use copy and paste.

    Hope that this helps others

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