[prashant]

Bootable USB Keys

To make a USB key bootable using the Vista/Windows PE (Windows Pre-installation Environment) version, you need to use the Diskpart commands. The commands are as follows:

1. Select disk 1 (or the number of your USB key, be careful!)
2. Clean (like I said, be careful! This erases the disk.)
3. Create partition primary
4. Select partition 1
5. Active
6. Format fs=fat32
7. Assign
8. Exit

After doing this, you copy the ISO folder to the USB key. That’s it. Now you have your universal tool for imaging and repairing Vista.

Now at this point you have a disk which will try to boot using BootMgr in the style of Windows PE/Vista/Longhorn server. You need to do this from Vista or the Vista build of Windows PE. Apart from these two operating systems, you cannot create a USB Key. Once the drive is formatted, it has a Vista Boot sector—this won’t boot NT/200x/XP operating systems.

You need to use the BootSect utility:

Boosect /nt52 E:

This stamps a Window 2003 Server boot sector (one which uses boot.ini) onto drive E:. You should be able to copy NTLDR, BOOT.INI, and NTDETECT.COM onto a USB key as a way of starting a machine suffering from a corrupt boot environment.