pxe stick lab at techready 11

i just finished session #2 of the create your own pxe stick lab at techready - thank you to everyone who attended!  you learned a few really important things in this session:

1.  how to create a bootable usb stick

2.  when/where series 4 of the it crowd will air in the u.s. (answer – ifc starting august 10th!!!)

3.  some information on how i am booting from vhd on my demo system

4.  a link to this blog post (or two – or three who knows how this will evolve) with a lot more information

this is a supporting article on the steps to create a bootable usb stick including how to build one from scratch.

step 1: download the microsoft deployment toolkit 2010 update 1 from www.microsoft.com/deployment

step 2: install it

step 3: download and install the waik (windows automated installation kit)

step 4: download an iso of windows 7 enterprise eval (bottom of this page: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/cc442495.aspx)

step 5: either burn the iso to dvd or even better, mount it with an iso utility like magic iso or virtual clone drive

step 6: setup a deployment share (step by steps coming soon)

step 7: add some drivers (will give real world example of a dell optiplex 745)

step 8: add some updates

step 9: add some applications

in the lab, we used a partition on the virtual hard drive to simulate an external usb device (see screen shot below from my acer 1420p)

using the command diskpart you will prepare a usb key (8 gb or larger) for the pxe stick content using the following commands (read the caution first)

caution: ensure that you have the usb key in focus before you type in clean - this deletes all partitions from the selected disk (i will add screen shots this weekend)

diskpart
select disk 1
list part
clean
create part pri
select part 1
active
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit

now you're ready to copy the content to the usb stick!

boot from vhd information will be consolidated from previous posts this weekend

blogs.technet.com/b/drey/archive/2009/11/25/boot-from-vhd-on-windows-xp-the-tuturial-part-1.aspx

i need to add a post about wim2vhd.wsf and installwindowsimage.ps1 but for now i’ll just link to the utilities:

code.msdn.microsoft.com/InstallWindowsImage

blogs.technet.com/b/drey/archive/2009/07/08/boot-from-vhd-the-step-by-step.aspx