Using a Windows PE Boot-CD with Windows Vista and Windows Automated Installation Toolkit to Manage Demo/Test PCs

mszCool's thoughts and cents revealed - Creating a Windows PE Boot-CD with Windows Vista and Windows AIK to get rid of your Demo-Machines

"About two months ago I discovered the Windows Automated Installation Toolkit (Windows AIK or just WAIK) to be able to work with different demo images for the sessions I did at TechEd Europe with physical machines instead of the (still much slower:)) Virtual PC images. The WAIK includes imagex.exe, which is a tool that allows you to create images of a partition of your machine and package them into the new Windows Imaging Files (WIM).

The first steps using WAIK and imagex.exe

These files can be used for centralized deployment via the Windows Deployment Services (successor of Remote Installation Services). But in my case I used it to image and restore different types of demo images for my physical machines as I did not want to work with the slower VPC counterparts at a conference such as TechEd Europe.

...

...So my idea was creating WIM images for each of the servers and either deploying them via Windows Deployment Services from my PDC or just from external hard disks. But I don't want to have two OS instances on each machine (one for imaging and image restore and the other one for "productive work"). So I required a CD-bootable version of Windows to be used as imaging and restore OS-instance with imagex.exe installed. Finally the WAIK includes all the tools for creating Windows PE instances which are bootable from either CDs, DVDs or USB sticks (!!).

..."

This is a cool post on some practical ways to use the new Windows Imaging Files (WIM) (think Ghost) to help manage demo/test PC's. While I'm a fan of Virtual PC images, sometimes you need to be a little closer to the hardware (or the hardware just isn't up to being a good VPC host).

The above post provides a real world look at using WIM/WAIK/ImageX/Windows PE/etc...