WinPE on the HD

treehouse786 asked me to write some notes on this topic. You can use this partition to do auto restore with Image for Windows, Drive Snapshot and Ghost32.

I'll use Active@ Boot Disk as an example..

Create a bootable USB flash drive with the Active@ Boot Disk Creator. Remember to add your required files in the User section (imagew.exe, snapshot.exe etc). Don't use a large flash drive. Half to 1 GB is fine.

Image the flash drive with IFW. Restore the image to unallocated space on your HD.
You need BootIt installed on your HD. Create a Boot Item in BootIt. Yoi can now boot Active@ from the Boot Menu.

(The Boot Menu lets you boot your OS, Active@ and your other OSs)

If you get this far and want to use the partition for auto restores, let me know. At present, your Active@ on the HD behaves much the same as from a CD.

 

Any advices on how to use USB flash drive without IFW - like a standard PE type thing? I have done it in the past, but it was always a headache. But, I would not mind a quick and dirty method of doing things.

I am sure we could discuss a dozen ways to PE lol.

Sul.

 

Reserving space for such a fine learning thread!

Best regards,

KOR!

 

Sul,

I'm not sure what you mean? If you mean imaging the flash drive with an app other than IFW, IFD, IFL, I haven't tried.

I have made IFD and IFL flash drives that will do auto restores over a network (the image is stored on another computer). Boot from the flash drive and pull it out as soon as the app loads. No using the menu.

 

many thanks brian

going to try this now

 

tree,

Maybe I shouldn't have used Active@ Boot Disk as my first example as it is not free. You can make a free WinPE USB flash drive by using this tutorial...

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/tbwinpe_tutorial.htm

Image the flash drive and restore the image to the HD. Once you are on top of this we can discuss how to make the HD partition restore different images.

 

Thanks All for that info. I will try and work my way through it

 

David,

Please let us know what you find.

 

Thanks Brian

That was very straightforward though I did it a bit differently.

I did not bother with IFW but used A @ I to create a USB boot. Made an image of it and restored it to my external disk.

That disk is a PATA in a USB converter box.

The BIOS has its own boot menu if you hit F8 at the right time, but think I will make it the first boot disk and Windows below, so I will only have to switch the drive on to boot straight to it.

Thanks for all your help.

 

That's what I have in my BIOS. The internal HD is last in the list.

WinPE boots faster from the USB HD than a CD. And WinPE on an internal HD boots even faster than USB.

 

Thanks Brian today I learn something new, now I'm runing IFW from my D drive and I like cause is really fast