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Using Windows PE with Ghost
In the past I have always used a Ghost boot disk or a bootable CD-ROM to take and deploy ghost images. But, now that I am ordering desktops and laptops without floppy drives and with the creation of Ghost boot disks becoming more difficult since they rely on DOS and DOS network drivers, there has to be a better way to make this happen.
Window PE is well suited for this task. Windows PE is a minimal Windows installation based on Windows Vista that contains minimal functionality that you need to run Setup, install Windows from a network share, automate basic processes, and perform hardware validation.
Task: Create a bootable USB flash drive with Windows PE that contains Ghost32.exe.
- Get a USB Flash Drive.
- Download and install the Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.
- Complete the following steps to make a bootable USB Flash Drive: Walkthrough: Create a Bootable Windows PE RAM Disk on CD-ROM (Note: I could not find the oscdimg program to make a bootable CD-ROM ISO file on my AIK installation. But, that is OK you don’t need it for a flash drive.)
- Open the “Windows PE Tools Command Prompt” and then mount the WinPE Image using the following command:
imagex /mountrw c:\winpe_x86\winpe.wim 1 c:winpe_x86\mount
Note: Review the following document for for information on creating a custom WinPE Image: Walkthrough: Create a Custom Windows PE Image.
- Create a folder called Ghost in the c:\winpe_x86\mount folder and copy the ghost32.exe file to the Ghost folder.
Note: The ghost32.exe file will have to come from your Ghost Solution Suite 2.0 installation.
- Unmount and commit the changes to the WinPE Image using the following command.
imagex /unmount c:winpe_x86\mount /commit
- Copy the new c:\winpe_x86\winpe.wim to the flash drive under the sources folder.
- Rename the old sources\boot.wim to boot_old.wim.
- Rename sources\winpe.wim to boot.wim.
- Now you are ready to boot the USB flash drive and give it a whirl.
Note: You can use the “net use” command to map a drive letter to the network.
net use Y: \network_share\Images
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