HowTo Boot WinPE from USB HDD

[iceangel89]

the question is in the title "HowTo Boot WinPE from USB HDD?" so i use something like GRUB4DOS? and how do i do that? like what do i have in the menu.lst file? and it will help if there is a reference on it (menu.lst)

1 thing i forgot how to do from last time... to boot install XP from USB HDD, i did a winnt32 /makelocalsource /noreboot (and if i want to use nLite's unattended settings how do i acheive that?) /unattended:D:\XPPRO\I386\WINNT.sif right? then the files from this will be created at C:\ and i need to copy them to my D:\XPPRO? < where all my setup files are.

[IcemanND]

From my guide you have worked through: (You may run into issues with chipset and usb controller drivers on some systems.)

Appendix F: Booting Windows PE from USB Flash Drive (UFD)

Before you can place Windows PE on a UFD device, you must use Diskpart to format the UFD with a Windows Vista or Windows PE environment.

1. From a running Windows Vista operation system or Windows PE session, insert your UFD device.

2. At a command prompt, use Diskpart to format the device as FAT32 spanning the entire device, and set the partition as active. For example,

Diskpart

select disk 1

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format fs=fat32

assign

exit

The example above assumes disk 1 is the UFD.

3. On your technician computer, copy all the content in the \ISO directory onto your UFD device. You can manually create the directory structure or use the xcopy command to automatically build and copy the appropriate files from your technician computer to your UFD device. For example,

xcopy c:\winpe_x86\iso\*.* /s /e /f f:\

where c: is your technician computer hard disk and f: is your UFD device..

[iceangel89]

erm, i am using a USB HDD so does this apply? cos when i try using a thumbdrive, when i try a list disk, the thumbdrive does not show. in show volumes it shows so i can't get the next commands, clean etc. and also whill select disk then clean wipe out all data in the partition? which means i can't or at least need to backup all my data? and in all these guides, it says use FAT why is this so?

[IcemanND]

That is the procedure I have used to boot from USB Flash drives and USB Hard drives. If the partitions on your drive were not created by from Vista or PE 2 then yes you will need to back it up first and the repartition and format it.

Why FAT32 that is what the instructions have said on every site I looked at, I have not tried NTFS, though recently I seem to recall someone posting something here about how they did it.