There is a version of Windows that you probably
have never heard of before, but have used without realizing it. It's called Windows PE. Now, when I say a version of Windows, you
might be thinking something like Windows 10 Pro or Home, but I don't mean that kind of
version. On the contrary, Windows PE is not made for
just general daily computer use at all, but it is still very useful. For example, for creating bootable USB rescue
drives that you can use to save your computer if it is broken and won't boot, or something
like that. So in this video, I'm going to explain what
is Windows PE all about, and also how you can create your very own Windows PE bootable
disk, if you want, from your own computer, so stick around. But before we continue, I want to thank today's
sponsor, Morning Brew, the free, high-quality, daily newsletter that will keep you up to
date on the latest in tech, business, and finance in just five minutes from Monday to
Sunday. It's a much better way to start the day than
what I used to do, which I don't know about you, was mostly just spending a bunch of time
reading useless crap on social media. Unlike traditional media though, Morning Brew
only curates the most relevant and informative stories. For example, just the other day I was reading
it and learned that Las Vegas is apparently getting the world's first cloud 5G network,
which is the latest marketing buzz, which means that companies are going to start building
backbones of 5G networks on Amazon's Web Services in the cloud, not just using their own data
centers. So this could potentially allow the faster
rollout of additional 5G networks around the nation. Good to know. To sign up for Morning Brew, which again is
completely free, just go to the link in the description and then enter the email address
you want to get the daily newsletter delivered to, and that's it. And so, with all that being said, let's continue. All right. So what exactly is Windows PE anyway? Well, it stands for pre-installation environment,
and it's basically a very stripped down, lightweight version of Windows. It's mostly used for things like deployment
of Windows, meaning the installation of Windows, maybe on hundreds of computers for an organization
or just one computer, your installation. Or it can be used for troubleshooting and
running outside of the normal Windows installation, if it won't run. Because unlike a full version of Windows,
Windows PE is designed to be so lightweight that it can be booted from a portable device
such as a USB drive, and it can be as small as just 300 megabytes to run. And these Windows PE installations are created
using the so-called Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit or ADK, which is a tool that
is free to download from Microsoft off their website. And like I said before, you probably have
actually used a version of Windows PE before, without realizing it. For example, the installation of Windows,
when you insert the Windows installation disk or USB disk, that actually boots up using
Windows PE, and then installs it from there to the full version. Or the Windows recovery environment. If Windows fails to boot up, then it brings
up a bunch of tools and stuff, and that's all running in Windows PE, which kind of makes
sense. It's good to have a super alternative, lightweight
operating system that can boot up if the main one isn't working, and that can potentially
be used to fix the main one. If you saw one of my previous videos talking
about different USB boot drive and rescue disks you can create, you might've heard me
talk about Hiren Boot CD, which is a rescue disk that has a bunch of tools on it, and
that actually is built using Windows PE. It looks like Windows 10 and they added stuff
in like the shell to make it actually look like that and all those other tools. But even though it looks like a regular version
of Windows with the whole full desktop interface and stuff, make no mistake, it's not a full
version of Windows, and it's very limited. It's really only good for some of the bare
basics, like maybe web browsing. This is not something you could use for daily
browsing and daily usage because it doesn't have, for example, all the dynamic link libraries
and backend software that Windows has, that a lot of software relies on. So you're not going to be playing any games
or anything like this, or running complicated software. You can't even install anything to it because
it doesn't have all the stuff that all those other softwares rely on. The reason you can add tools and stuff to
it is because a lot of those tools have portable versions where everything needed to run those
programs is contained with it, alongside it, but stuff that you have to actually download
and install probably wouldn't work. But again, it's still very useful because
it's able to run a lot of those useful tools outside of Windows. So why don't I go over how you can build your
very own USB boot drive with Windows PE on it. Again, it's going to be kind of limited, so
you might just be better off downloading a pre-made one with a bunch of tools added,
but this will still be pretty interesting because it goes over a lot of stuff you probably
didn't even know was in Windows and maybe better understanding in the future could potentially
mean that you can fix things better in the future. So the first thing you're going to have to
do is go on Microsoft's website. Again, I'll put the links in the description
and download the Windows ADK, Assessment and Deployment Toolkit. After you download and run it, it may actually
say that you already have Windows ADK installed in which case you could uninstall it and re-install
this one to update it, or you could try the rest of this without updating. I don't know how well it'll work. Anyway, I realized that apparently I did have
it installed already, so I just uninstalled that one, and re-installed this new one I
just got. When you run the installer, just select to
install it to this computer and then take note of that install path. And then just go next until you get to the
feature section, you can just do all the defaults or if you want, you can check them all and
install everything if you want, and then it'll just go and install. After that though, you'll also have to download
the separate Windows PE add-on for the ADK. It's not actually included in that, you have
to download a separate thing, I'll put that link of course, too. So just run that installer now, select "install
for this computer" again, and then go until it says select features, which there is only
one available, the Windows PE thing. It's about 5.5 GB, and then do the same thing,
install it. And then it's going to go into this directory,
the Program Files (x86) > Windows kits > 10 > and then Assessment and Deployment Toolkit. So now that's installed. To actually use it, you go into the start
menu and do a search for "deployment and imaging tools environment". It should come up, and then run that as an
admin. So note that it opens to the same installed
directory as a CMD command prompt window, but this is not the same as just opening CMD
and going to that directory. For some reason, you have to actually make
sure that this environment program running like is shown being in the window title. So after that window is open, the command
we're going to use is copype. So if you just type that in, it's going to
show some info about it and the syntax, and you can see that in the brackets, some of
the parameters you're going to need are the different CPU architectures. Most of you will just use amd64, which is
just 64 bit processors. Even if it's Intel, it's still going to be
called amd64. And x86 is for 32 bit processors, which aren't
really that common anymore. And you can check if you want to be sure if
you go to about PC and it says x64-based processor, that's amd64. The next parameter will be the working directory,
which is basically the location it's going to put the files temporarily. And that can be wherever. So all put together, the command I'm going
to use is copype and then amd64, and then the location I'm going to put it is in the
top level directory C:\WinPE is all I'm going to call it. One thing to understand is this working directory
is not where it's actually installing this USB bootable thing to. So don't set this location to the USB flash
drive. Think of it like baking a cake, where you
get all the ingredients together and put everything in a pan first, before you put it in the oven. That's basically what we're doing here. The working directory is basically the pan
where you put all the ingredients in and then once everything's added, then you can burn
it to the actual USB, and that would be where you're putting it in the oven in our analogy. So we're just preparing things in this working
directory first. So don't set it to the USB drive, it won't
work. After you run this command, it will simply
say success. And then you can see that the folder is there
where I set. Now at this point, the next step is just going
to be running the program to actually take those files and burn it onto the USB drive
in a special way so it'll actually work. But you could, at this stage, also add stuff
into the Windows PE installation. However, if you do it using the official Windows
methods that is on Microsoft's website, it's actually extremely complicated and you have
to basically install certain packages after mounting .WIM files, I forget what they stand
for, and you have to copy packages from one into the other. It's kind of a nightmare and they're not actually
any really useful packages anyway, for most people. So you can read about that on Microsoft's
website if you want to be able to do this, but for this example, we're just going to
do the most basic version. So to actually put this onto the USB drive,
make sure you have an empty USB drive that you don't care about any of the data on it,
because this is going to be completely wiped and formatted. So make sure that's plugged in, and then we're
going to go back into that same ADK window we were using before. The command we're going to be using is MakeWinPEMedia. And again, if we just type it in like that,
it's going to show some info about it and the syntax. And you can see that it says it creates a
bootable Win PE flash drive or ISO, and I'm paraphrasing there. You can either do the parameter /UFD or /ISO. UFD stands for USB Flash Drive. And in that case, the whole drive is going
to be formatted, just used for Windows PE. And for ISO though, it's going to make an
ISO that you can later use to burn onto one or multiple USB disks or CDs. Then the two locations we put our first, the
working directory, then the destination. So the thumb drive or the ISO location. Note the order here, don't mix them up or
you could risk formatting the entire wrong hard drive or something like that. So first we can do the super basic version,
which is just formatting a whole drive, and then we'll do the ISO, which is actually probably
better, and I'll show you why after that. So for this, we can put in our own parameters
as MakeWinPE /ufd C:\WinPE, that's our working directory, and then my flash drive is in drive
M: Double check again, to make sure that the drive letter is correct, it will say it to
confirm it. And then once you run it, it's just going
to copy the files over. And then you can see once it's done, that
the Win PE directory is only about 300 megabytes. So at this point you could just plug that
USB in and it'll boot to Win PE, but let me show you next, how to do the ISO version and
why I think this is actually probably better. So this time the command will be, MakeWinPEMedia
/iso, and then the location of the working directory. Again, C:\WinPE and then where I'm going to
put the ISO, I'll just put it in there again, C:\WinPE and call it winpe.iso. Take note that for the ISO location, you have
to write out the whole thing, including the name you want to call it, and you also have
to choose a directory that already exists, or else you'll get an error. It's not going to create a new folder if the
one you put doesn't exist yet, for example. But after you run it, you can see it's in
there. It was pretty much instant for me, maybe because
I have an SSD, but way faster than making the USB. Now, at this point, you could just burn the
ISO onto the USB drive with another program, and then it would basically be like the other
one we made directly, but there's actually a better option I recently found out about
called Ventoy. It's a software that everyone was telling
me about in the comments of my USB boot drive video. And basically, it allows you to create a multiple
bootable USB drive. So instead of just having to make one USB
drive per bootable disk, you can actually put as many as you want, as will fit on one
drive, and you can select that when you're booting up the computer, which is way awesome. I'll put the link of that in the description,
but once you run Ventoy and use it to set up a USB drive, it'll create a bunch of partitions. Some of them you won't be able to see, but
for the one that is visible, called Ventoy, literally all you do is copy and paste ISOs
into that USB drive, and then those are the ones that will be selectable and bootable
from the screen when you boot up the computer. Quick note, however, one reason you might
choose not to use Ventoy though, is because it might not play well with something called
Secure Boot, which is basically a security feature in a lot of computers these days that
only boots using certain signed softwares. Now with the Windows PE standalone disk or
most other standalone disks, that's all signed, so you shouldn't have any problem, really. But with Ventoy, you might have to either
disable secure boot on your BIOS settings, which isn't too hard, but you might not know
how to do it. Or alternatively, Ventoy does actually support
Secure Boot, but you have to go through a couple of extra steps, for example, enabling
it and choosing to enable it when you set up the USB drive initially, and you're going
to have to go through several steps on the first time you've run it on a particular computer. All those instructions will be on Ventoy's
website, and I was able to follow them and get it working. But you might not want to have to deal with
that. You might be scared of looking at some of
the complicated stuff, but it's not too hard if you just follow it. So it'll still work. You just have to be aware of that. Now in any case, no matter how you're going
to boot up, whether with Ventoy or just making a standalone disk, it should be good to go. You plug it in, you boot into it, and then
what you'll see is... A command prompt window, and that's basically
it. So yes, it is more bare bones than maybe you
were even expecting. However, that doesn't mean that just because
it's command line, that is not useful. In fact, there are several tools that are
normally built into Windows that you can now access from here and could potentially be
used to fix your computer. For example, there's disk part for messing
around with disk partitions and stuff. There's DISM, which can be used to validate
the integrity of different system files and stuff like that. Same with SFC, that's also a very similar
system file checker, same use, and even BCD edit for changing the boot records and stuff
like that. There are plenty more though. If you do the command DIR and then the filter
*.exe, this will show you all the different exe that you can run right from this command
line. Now this is going to show all the executables
here, so some are just background, not actually tools, but it will show some utilities too. So you can see 'chkdsk' in there for example,
I forgot to mention that one. So yeah, this is cool and all, though it is
limited. There's not even really a desktop. However, you can actually technically access
Windows Explorer if you run Notepad. Yes, that's in here too. And then if you go to file open, well, there's
your Explorer window right there. You can actually navigate through there, delete
stuff, copy stuff, whatever. It just might not be what you're usually used
to, but it might still work. All right, so that's pretty cool. But what if you wanted to create, again, your
own Windows PE boot drive, but do want to add certain custom programs and stuff? Well, the easiest way to probably do that
would be using a program called Win10XPE. This program basically lets you create a customized
Win PE boot disk, and it allows you to choose from a whole bunch of different tools that
have been pre-prepared for Windows PE, you just select which one you want to add. When you do run it, you'll see it's called
WinBuilder, that's because I believe the Win10XPE is the name of the project and it uses Win
Builder. But anyway, it's the same thing. Keep in mind though, to get this program actually
working and to actually use it, you will have to disable your antivirus because there are
a couple of false positives that might show up. Now that being said, everything I've read
about it indicates that it's completely safe and they are indeed false positives. I have not heard anyone saying that it actually
is a secret virus. It's a pretty popular program and I ran it
myself. So if it still sketches you out, maybe don't
run it, but just know that you are going to have to disable your antivirus to run. So anyway, first it's going to have you download
a specific ISO for a version of Windows, and it's going to have links to where you can
download that. After you do download and then select the
ISO, you then go in and simply choose the programs you want to add and include or not. So you can see me going through a whole bunch
of these in here, and there's all sorts of different categories like antivirus, utilities,
networking and stuff. There's some media ones, for example, there's
Media Player Classic and VLC Media player in there that weren't selected by default,
so I added those in. Also it didn't have Firefox selected, only
Google Chrome. So I figured why not add that in. I pretty much selected everything except for
a couple that I knew would be kind of useless, because I did really intend to use this as
a potential future rescue disk for my own self. After you select all the programs, there are
a ton more customizations. You can choose the profile picture, the wallpaper,
all sorts of themes and stuff. I'm not going to get into that. Just know that those options are there if
you really want to dig down into it. But once you have everything selected, you
simply click the play button and that's going to go through and compile and create this
boot disk and put it into an ISO that can then be used and burned onto the drive in
a number of ways. So this could take a while, if you get any
breaking error messages or something, it probably is your antivirus blocking it, but I'll just
fast forward anyway. So anyway, once it's done, you'll see the
ISO is in the same folder as the program we just ran. So again, you can make this bootable in any
number of ways, either using Ventoy or just using a regular ISO burner to put it on a
CD or a USB. I'm just going to use Ventoy again, maybe
I'll rename these to something a little bit more easier to recognize. So anyway, once you boot it up, it's going
to look a lot more familiar, like the regular Windows 10 that I'm used to, and you can see
it does have all those tools and stuff that I selected. It's all either on the desktop or in the start
menu and stuff like that. You got the full Windows Explorer, you can
look through the different drives. Very, very useful, could come in handy. So obviously Windows PE is very useful, but
you don't actually have to go through the whole hassle of creating your own Windows
PE boot drive, whether you're using the official Microsoft tools or even using this Win10XPE
software. Instead, you could just go online and search
for "Windows 10 PE rescue disks", and there are several projects people have made. And since they are pre-made, usually they
just come as pre-packaged ISOs, so they're extremely easy to install. You can either burn it directly or again,
run it off Ventoy, so no building or compiling or anything required. Like I mentioned, I'd probably get Hiren Boot
CD PE is probably the one I'm the most familiar with. So that's really the only one I'm going to
mention. I haven't used any other ones, but you might
be able to find it. But in any case, now you know a little bit
more about how Windows works and you probably came out of this with a new rescue disk that
you could use the next time disaster strikes on your computer. So thanks again to Morning Brew for sponsoring
this video. Again, be sure to click the link in the description
and sign up for Morning Brew's daily newsletter, so you can stay up to date on the latest in
tech, business and finance. If you guys want to keep watching, the next
video I recommend is that previous video I mentioned, where I go over four different
bootable USB drives that you should probably make before it's too late, and they could
really come in handy. So you can just click that right there, and
thanks for watching, guys. I'll see you in the next one.
