Winpe on Anything About IT

Windows 8 – Script for customizing WinPE 4.0 – Part 1

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:48:55 +0000

Today I want to share with you a small script I’ve put together for customizing WinPE 4.0 that will ship with Windows 8. I’ve rewritten the script based on some existing script code we already use today, but wanted by purpose a small independent script that I can hook in between the standard scripts provided within the ADK sources, mainly for familiarizing myself with anything new within WinPE 4.0.

When you install the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) on a 64 bit system, you will find the WinPE 4.0 sources stored under C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment.

Reducing size of WinPE

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:23:35 +0000

Today I have been looking into the new “Profiling” options for Windows PE 3.0. Using the profiling options allow you to reduce the content of Windows PE to an absolute minimum without removing any boot critical content.

I am not going to re-write a step by step process here, as it is all described within the Windows PE User Guide for Windows 7 but here are the basic things

First build your PE boot.wim the way you have been doing it so far, but before unmounting it run the following command as well: dism /image:C:\PE\mount /Enable-profiling

The VistaPE project

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:11:45 +0000

Those of you that work within the desktop management space might be familiar with the PE Builder aka as BartPE.Since WinPE was only available to enterprise customers, BartPE was a good alternative for those that had did not have access to WinPE. the PE builder allowed building a preboot environment boot CD by just using the Windows XP or Windows 2003 sources.

With the release of the Windows Automated Installation kit (WAIK), anyone has access to WinPE 2.0, so anyone now can build his PE based boot sources.

Prep-ing WINPE does make a difference

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:35:57 +0000

When creating WinPE 2.0 boot images, make sure you run the PEImg /prep command against your boot.wim as it does make a significant difference in sze as shown in the table below:

Bootable ISO file with WiinPE 2.0 Size in MB

boot.wim prepped 146 mb

boot.wim not prepped 203 MB

Considering this all is loaded into memory, you might want to make sure to reduce the size of the boot.wim to an absolute minimum.