Creating a WinPE 3.1 USB

WinPE 3.1 is a MS toolkit for deploying images. (Version 3.1 supports upto Win 7 SP1)

These steps will create a a Windows PE 3.1 Bootable USB with imagex.exe integrated.
imagex.exe will be use to "capture" and "deploy images on machines.

1) Download and install Windows AIK 3.0 (Windows 7) or Windows AIK 3.1 (Windows 7 SP1)
2) Extract Windows AIK 3.1 iso file.
3) Insall AIK 3.1 with the following command. You need to run this in a elevated promp
"xcopy E:\ "C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools" /ERDY"
where E:\ is the root directory of the ISO image.

4) Follow step 1 & 2 to prepare for a custom WinPE image here.

5) Follow step 3 in the MS doc to add the "WinPE-WDS-Tools" component. This will install the images.exe utility in your WinPE image.

6) Follow step 6 in the MS doc to unmount the image.

7) Follow step 3 in this MS doc to create a WinPE bootable USB.

Capture an image:

1) Boot the computer into the WinPE environment with the WinPE USB you created.

2) run this command: images.exe /capture /compress max "image name"

Deploy an image:

1) Boot the computer into the WinPE environment with the WinPE USB you created.

2) run diskpart.exe to configure your disk partitions and assign drive letter:

diskpart

select disk 0

clean

create primary partition

format quick fs=ntfs

active

assign letter="c"

exit

3) apply the image using imagex.exe: imagex.exe /apply 1 c:

4) setup the system partition for booting: bcdboot.exe c:\Windows