Create a bootable USB thumb drive.
I’m currently involved in a project at work which has required me to deploy Windows Vista to a huge infrastructure of computers. Since we do not (yet) have SMS in our environment, I’ve had to opt for the Lite Touch method of deployment.
There are actually two types of deployment using the BDD (Business Desktop Deployment) Workbench from Microsoft. Lite Touch and Zero Touch. The latter requires SMS and allows a fully automated deployment. However, with Lite Touch, you need to actually initiate the deployment on the client computer. This can be done a number of ways, but the best (and fastest) way for me is to use a USB flash drive to start the Deployment. Before you can boot from one of these little fellas, you must first prep it to boot. Follow these simple instructions and you’ll soon have in your possesion a self booting UFD!
- The first thing you need to do is download this tool (HP USB Format Tool). You need to use this rather than the bog standard Windows format, otherwise the rest of the process will fail!
- Once you have installed the software, you can use it to format your USB device. Make sure you choose NTFS as the file system, and uncheck the tick boxes at the bottom.
- Once the drive is formatted, jump into a command prompt and run the following commands (assuming that 1 is the disk number allocated to the USB disk, you can check by running the command - select disk 1, detail disk)
diskpart
select disk 1
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs
assign
exit
You now have a USB thumb drive that is good enough to boot from! All you need to do is use a tool like Daemon Tools to mount the WinPE ISO the BDD created and copy all the files to the thumb drive. The drive will now boot in to WinPE.
