Windows Vista boot UFD

Another Use for WinPE: WinRE UFD To the Rescue

If you’ve ever messed with the Windows Vista Recovery Environment you know it’s helpful, but it can take quite a while for it to appear on-screen on a machine in need of repair or recovery. In fact, the functionality behind this display is a WinPE-based facility that’s bundled with the Windows Install Media, and invoked from a Windows Image file (.wim) when you select the “Repair an existing Vista system” from the install menu.

This low-res screen cap of the Recovery Environment describes your Vista Repair options:
here, you want to pick Windows Complete PC Restore.

On most of my Vista machines, it takes in excess of three minutes to get from the Vista install DVD to the System Recovery Options menu shown in the preceding screen capture, and it can sometimes take more than 10 minutes to pop up (as when finding and fixing boot-up issues, as it sometimes must). If you follow the instructions I provide in a recent story for Tom’s Guide “How to Make and Use a Bootable WinPE Drive” you will learn how to use the install media and the Windows Automated Instllation Kit (WAIK) to create a bootable UFD with the Vista Recovery Environment at your disposal. Unlike its DVD-based counterpart, however, this little gem usually presents itself on-screen in under two minutes, which lets you get to work far faster (on the notebook in question, the screen popped up in 1:07).

I was forcibly reminded of this yesterday, when I installed a new driver on one of my test notebook PCs, only to discover that the device went missing upon reboot, and that System Restore was also unable to roll back to the preceding restore point (I later learned this comes from a side effect of Norton security products, as documented in this Symantec page on the “Restoration Incomplete” error also produced during this process). What to do when restore points won’t work (and you don’t yet know how to fix that problem): use the Recovery Environment and a recent backup to restore your system to a pristine state. Luckily for me, I had just backed up my system the night before so I was back up and running in under 15 minutes, restore and all. This time, I skipped the IDT HD Audio driver update that started all my problems, and then went off to research exactly what happened, and why. In a roundabout way, all this led to today’s blog post.

Nevertheless, I was glad to have had this handy little tool at my disposal, which I’ve already used to repair Vista on a couple of machines since building the WinRE UFD in late January. You might want to add one of these to your toolkit. Any old UFD larger than 256MB will do: my WinRE UFD weighs in at 330 MB in all. Thus, a freebie or cheapie 1 GB UFD will work just fine for this purpose.

Other Uses for a Bootable WinPE UFD

I’ve just finished writing a story for Tom’s Guide on using a bo0table WinPE UFD, and doing the research  for that story led me to a few interesting discoveries. First and foremost, no self-respecting Vista administrator should be without a bootable WinRE UFD–but perhaps, WinRE is more recognizable as the Windows Recovery Environment that you can fire up from the Windows Vista installation media.

It turns out, you can also follow my instructions on building a bootable WinPE UFD, and then use the imagex utility from the Windows Automated Installation Kit to capture the recovery environment Windows Image (.wim) file from your installation media. All you have to do then is swap the boot.wim file that my process creates in your ISO\sources directory with the boot.wim file that you export from your install media, and presto! you’ve got a WinRE console that boots in under two minutes, instead of having to wait three to five minutes for the same functionality to become available from the Vista installation DVDs.

Because I’m always messing with various Vista installs, I have to resort to the recovery environment at least once a week where I work. I’m guessing that busy system admins with any number of Vista machines to care for can beat that frequency with ease. In such cases, a bootable UFD with the WinRE console ready to hand can help save lots of wait time, and enable more “work time” on affected Vista systems.

Another, perhaps more esoteric use, might be on netbook PCs where disk space can be at a premium. I’m learning how to extend the WinPE environment to run other programs, including Windows Explorer (and some claim, even IE) from within the WinPE context. Because most simple Windows GUI apps (think items in the Accessories folder, as good examples of what this means) will already run in WinPE, it’s not hard to conceive that a somewhat extended WinPE environment could be workable for netbook users seeking to slim runtime system size to 0.5GB or smaller (by itself, the WinPE I describe how to build in my previous blog is about 367 MB in size; WinRE is less than 250 MB, but lacks network drivers and access).

As time goes by, I’m sure I’ll figure out some other cool uses for WinPE as well. If you know of any, please share them with me in the meantime!

Create a bootable WinPE UFD

Everybody knows what a UFO is, but let me remind readers that Microsoft interprets UFD as “USB Flash Drive.” Thus, what I’m about to describe is best understood as how to create a bootable Flash drive that includes the Windows Vista SP1 Pre-boot Environment (aka Window PE or even WinPE). Interestingly, if you simply troll TechNet or the Microsoft Download Center, you’ll be directed to Windows Automated Installation Kit version 1.0. But if you’re working from post-SP1 Vista (as most readers of this blog probably are), you really want Version 2.1, which is designed to support that environment. You’ll find that on the download page entitled “Automation Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008” instead.

You’ll download an ISO image of the latest WAIK, which you must then burn to a DVD (it’s 1.2 GB in size and won’t fit on a CD). I used Alex Feinman’s excellent Windows Explorer add-in named ISO Recorder v3 for this (and for all my iso files) but you can use any Vista-compatible DVD burning program you like to do this job. AFter that run the file named startcd.exe on the DVD to launch WAIK. This produces the following screen:

WAIK 2.1 welcome

Click the option that reads Windows AIK Setup to install WAIK on your current computer (it must be running Vista SP1, in case this isn’t completely obvious). By default this installs WAIK in the C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\ directory. Click your way through the installation screens to make the various WAIK tools available on your PC (on my desktop, this took about three minutes, YMMV).

Next, click Start, All Programs, Windows AIK, then finally Windows PE Tools Command Prompt. Inside the command window, type

Copype.cmd x86 C:\winpe_x86:

where x86 indicates a 32-bit environment and x64 a 64-bit environment, and C:\winpe_x86 is where the various WinPE binaries and directories will be created. After that you can copy tools and utilities from the WAIK Tools directory for your architecture (x86 for 32-bit PCs, and so forth) into the ISO subdirectory beneath C:\Winpe_x86. I usually grab Imagex.exe and the Package Manager, using these commands:

copy "c:\program files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\imagex.exe" c:\winpe_x86\iso\
xcopy "c:\program files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\Servicing" c:\winpe_x86\iso\Servicing /s

Of course, you’ll have to change the architecture designation for a 64-bit install to x64, and you’ll need to tell the CLI that the xcopy command points to a directory specification, but otherwise things should work for you, if you simply cut and paste these commands into the command window you’ll have open when you create the C:\WinPE_86 environment on your machine.

Next, you must scrub your UFD clean, mark its single partition as active, and format it for FAT32. The following sequence of commands will do the trick (replace n with the actual disk number for your UFD, use the list disk command inside diskpart to get this information:

diskpart
select disk n
clean
create partition primary size=
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

After that you need only copy the ISO subdirectory from your C: drive to the drive letter for your UFD to make your bootable image thereupon. The following xcopy command will work (just be sure to correct the drive letter at the end of that command string):

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

As you work with this boot image, you’ll probably find other tools you want to add to your toolbox. You must copy them into the ISO subdirectory on your C: drive (along with any other supporting files they might need), then reformat the UFD, and repeat the preceding xcopy command to make them available when you boot from that drive.