Booting from a Hard Disk Drive

Although it might seem strange to be booting Windows PE from a hard disk drive, you can do this to perform refresh installations of Windows 7. By loading Windows PE onto the hard disk and booting it to RAM, you can repartition your systems disks and install the new Windows 7 image.

To boot Windows PE from a hard disk drive, perform the following steps:

1. Boot your computer from prepared Windows PE media.
2. Using DiskPart, prepare the computer's hard disk for installation of Windows PE. Use the DiskPart commands shown in Table below.
   
   Preparing a Hard Drive for Windows PE

   Command	Description
   select disk 0	0 is the primary hard disk drive.
   clean	Removes the current partition structures.
   create partition primary size=size	size is a partition size large enough to hold the Windows PE source files.
   select partition 1	Selects the partition created by the previous command.
   active	Marks the new partition as active.
   format	Formats the new partition.
   exit	Quits DiskPart.

3. Copy the Windows PE files from your Windows PE media to your hard disk.
   xcopy /chery x:\*.* c:\