I was intrigued to find that a new version of Windows PE had been released and it was labeled as 2.0 or “the Vista version” if you will. One of the biggest enhancements that I could see was the hot plugging of USB devices… so I went looking for it..

This version of PE is found within the Windows Vista Windows Automated Installation Kit – yea, that’s a mouthful alright! I’ll just call it the AIK. You can download this thing here and its a staggering 992 megabytes to do so. After downloading, burning the image on a disk and installing the program your presented with a number of tools and features – what you want to get at is the Windows PE part of this – this is all found in the C:Program FilesWindows AIKToolsPEtools folder.

You’ll start off by simply making an distro of the WinPE disk itself by running the following command:

copype.cmd x86 c:\winpe_x86

Then, create the ISO image using the following command as an example:

oscdimg -n -bc:\winpe_x86\etfs\boot.com c:winpe_x86\ISO c:winpe_x86\winpe_x86.iso

One warning though, copying and pasting the above command may cause you issues, so typing it manually may be the only way to get it working.

You’d then burn this to disk and use it to boot from a target computer..