The one tool all modern Windows admins still require

I still have my old DOS boot floppy disk, which I used for so many installations of Windows 95 and Windows NT. Eventually I had evolved versions that booted and found my CD-ROM and, later, the network for large-scale deployments. But over time I found myself using a boot floppy less and less as CDs became bootable and the installation became easier. However, every once in a while a circumstance comes up that requires me to boot to a command prompt, have access to drives and the network, and fix a problem or deploy an operating system. You may have to scan for a virus, rescue files, perform testing outside of the operating system — there are dozens of reasons you may need to boot into a mini-OS that resides directly in your computer’s memory. Now where did I put that DOS floppy again?

Obviously new times call for new methods, and there are several good choices for you to work with, given that fewer and fewer computers come with floppy drives any more (the new MacBook Air, for example, uses a thumb drive as a rescue disk).

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Consider the following options:

• Knoppix is a free and open source bootable CD with a collection of Gnu/Linux software. It provides for automatic hardware detection and supports a variety of cards, sound cards, and SCSI and USB devices.
• Bart PE is a free tool that helps you build a preinstalled environment bootable Windows CD or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation CD. It provides a Win32 environment with an 800-by-600-pixel screen resolution and support for FAT, NTFS, and CDFS file systems.
• Ultimate Boot CD allows you to boot up from the CD and use a variety of free diagnostic tools that you can burn onto CDs with the provided ISO disc-image files. There are tests for the BIOS, CPU, memory, and disk, along with boot management tools, data recovery, and hard disk tools. It uses a Linux base, but there is an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows based on Bart PE.

Although these tools are certainly excellent and helpful, many administrators — especially deployment experts — prefer to stick with the Microsoft Windows PE boot disk. This disk is provided free of charge as part of Microsoft’s Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). There are two editions of WAIK: one for Windows 7, and one for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. There is also a Windows Server 2008 HPC edition.

Here are some facts you should know about Windows PE:

• The main purpose of Windows PE is to replace DOS as an easily bootable and lightweight OS for deployment of Windows and troubleshooting various aspects of an installed OS. It runs from RAM as drive letter X and provides a command-line interface.
• It can run in 32- or 64-bit mode and is the base platform for deployment, recovery, and cloning utilities such as WinInternals ERD commander and the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).
• The current version is 3.0, which is built from the Windows 7 code base and is included with the WAIK 2.0 download. It includes XML scripting support and a replacement tool for image deployment called Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM).
• You can boot Windows PE from a CD, DVD, external HD, or USB flash drive.
• Windows PE cannot be used as a full-blown OS because it is designed to reboot every 72 hours. Even if you got your app up and running in Windows PE, you would have to redo it every 72 hours.

You can use Windows PE to deploy an image to a bare-metal PC by booting into the Windows PE OS. You can also create an image for deployment. First, you create your main system, and then boot to the Windows PE environment to create your image. (You can also boot with the Window PE CD to troubleshoot a system. The basic tools you get when creating a Windows PE disk may not suffice for your troubleshooting, so you will likely have to bring in other tools as well.)

Once you install WAIK on a deployment system, start with the Deployment Tools Command Prompt, which includes paths to all the new deployment tools (like ImageX) you installed. Start the process by copying the Windows PE image to make your own. Once you have your winpe.wim file, use the oscdimg tool to make it into a bootable ISO you can use for virtual systems or to burn to a CD for physical system boots.

There is a lot to learn about Windows PE, WAIK, DISM, ImageX, and so on. I encourage you to spend the time and money on either a conference or video class on the topic.

This article, “The one tool all modern Windows admins still require,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in business software and Windows at InfoWorld.com.