jaclaz, Yes, I have normal Win 7 on a box. I hibernated the machine. Some boxes (like Dell) allow you to change the boot order (F12) and boot from USB even though the box is hibernated. Then PE will boot. With WinPE, after I shutdown WinPE, I could boot normally and the old hibernated Win 7 box would resume. Of course, you can screw up everything if you change the disk while in hibernate state so be careful. All I think we should take hibernate out of the issue. If I boot a normally shutdown box with a WinPE 4.0, and then , once booted, navigate to the location of the normal BCD file (typically c:\Boot\BCD) and check the modified date of the file. It will have a time that is consistent with when the WinPE was booted. That is what I don't understand.