We’ve covered it before but it’s worth taking another look at the little-known version of Windows that is used to run the Windows Vista installation process: Windows PE 2.0.

It’s available as a standalone streamlined operating system which is incredibly helpful for all sorts of other things like system recovery and imaging.

It’s a highly stripped-back version of Vista that you can download free of charge as part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) — here’s an article we did last year on how to install and use it.

Since those earlier articles a couple of questions have sprung up about how to use the available tools to modify Windows PE-based boot images.

This is a pretty important issue because Windows PE is also used for the Windows Distribution System (WDS) Microsoft’s new software for deploying Vista across a large number of PCs via a network. Since WDS by its nature must work across various hardware platforms it probably needs more drivers than the smallish set that comes with it.

This can cause problems some of which I encountered in two different imaging scenarios – a virtual client loaded the boot image but I was told that there was no support for the network card (a definite problem for a network installation!) and another client with an nForce-based motherboard that simply bluescreened due to lack of appropriate system and SATA/IDE drivers.

Here’s how to get around the problem.