Prepping Your UFD
For this job, I’ll haul out the first UFD I ever bought: a venerable FujiFilm 256 MB UFD that’s at least 10 years old.
Inside the PETools command window, you’ll invoke the diskpart utility, then issue the sequence of commands shown in the next sequence of screenshots, except you must be very careful to select the disk number that corresponds to your UFD. This is easier than you might think as these commands will illustrate:
- 1. After you insert the UFD in your system and it becomes visible to Explorer, type "diskpart" into the command window. After that, type “list disk” to list the disks that the utility recognizes by number and size. Note that Disk 4 is only 244 MB in size—obviously, it’s our target here. Your UFD should be equally easy to identify. If in doubt, remove all other UFDs from your system so only one small-capacity device appears in this list. Select that disk by number, so in this case type "select disk 4."
- 2. Next, you’ll wipe that disk clean, create a primary partition of a size no larger than what’s listed in the Size entry, select that partition, and make it active. See the screenshot for precise syntax.
- 3. Finally, you’ll format this disk for the Fat32 file system, assign it a drive letter, then exit the diskpart utility. Warning: even on small UFDs this format operation can take a while (the bigger it is the longer it takes).
- 4. To create your bootable Windows PE image on the UFD, you must now copy the ISO directory inside c:\winpe_x86 over to this pristine flash drive. The following xcopy command does this job nicely (use Windows Explorer to make sure you reference the correct drive letter all the way at the end of this command, which in this case is drive J:, although yours will probably differ):
We shot the first and last bits of this final xcopy command because it was too long to show in total. Note that the file named boot.wim is stored in the \sources\ directory—this becomes important in our next exercise. For now, please understand that this is the Windows image you created using the copype.cmd command at the very beginning of this exercise. This contains the entire WinPE 2.0 environment, but does not include the System Recovery Options we depicted in the screenshot that kicks off this story.
