Windows Automated Installation Kit

Windows PE and the PE Walkthroughs

The Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) 2.0 delivers a basic, no-frills operating system with limited services and no GUI capabilities that’s built upon the Windows Vista kernel. You can use it to prep a PC for Vista installation, to copy disk images from a network file server to a target machine, and to fire off Windows Vista setup and installation. To learn more about Windows PE, check out the Technet article “What is Windows PE?“

With a little foreknowledge about Windows PE at your disposal, you can’t help but find these Windows PE Walkthroughs (step-by-step instructions on building and using various Windows PE environments) on TechNet of terrific interest:

• Walkthrough: Create a Bootable Windows PE RAM Disk on CD-ROM
• Walkthrough: Create a Bootable Windows PE RAM Disk on UFD
  (In case this acronym is unfamiliar to you, as it was to me: UFD = USB Flash Drive)
• Walkthrough: Create a Bootable Windows PE RAM Disk on Hard Disk
• Walkthrough: Boot Windows PE from CD-ROM
• Walkthrough: Boot Windows PE from Hard Disk
• Walkthrough: Create a Custom Windows PE Image

By the time you work your way through this material, you’ll be well-prepared to deal with most of the chores related to creating and manipulating the Windows Image (.wim) files that Vista uses for installation and setup. Definitely worth getting to know, and spending some time with. I’m pitching a book on this subject right now myself, with a Web site to go along with it, in fact. WinPE is also great for Vista troubleshooting, low-level system maintenance and repair, and more as well.

Dig Into Vista Install Capabilities To Fit Target Hardware

By itself, Vista does a pretty good job of fitting itself to the platforms on which it’s installed. But savvy administrators can do a lot more to construct custom Vista install images with a bit of time and effort, and the right tools and approaches. To get a good sense of what kinds of capabilities you can put to work, for example, read this interview from 2006 (!) Microsoft Australia’s John Pritchard. Entitled “Inside Vista’s new image-based install” it’s as good an overview of what the Windows Imaging (.WIM) file capability that drives Vista installs can do for customized images as well as standard ones. It also discusses how to integrate executable (.exe, .msi, and so forth) driver installers as part of the Vista install process to further customize Vista images for specific hardware configurations. Interested admins will also find Paul Thurrot’s “Windows Vista Review/Part 3: Installing Windows Vista” illuminating as well.

For this kind of task, however, the Windows Automated Installation Kit page on Technet provides pointers to the primary resources admins will need to explore these possibilities further. That’s where you’ll find pointers to the WAIK User’s Guide, a discussion of Windows Preinstallation Phases, the Deployment Tools Technical Reference, and the Unattended Windows Setup Reference, all of which play important roles in this activity.

In my next blogs, I’ll be digging into this task further, with some examples and illustrations, and exploring this document set in more detail. Stay tuned!

–Ed–