Creating a WinPE boot disk for SCCM with integrated drivers

I’m busy with desktop deployment project, utilising SCCM’s OSD functionality.  This required creating a WinPE-based boot image which contains the necessary network and mass-storage drivers to allow the bare-metal deployment process to connect to my SCCM server.

Here is how I did it:

Download and Install the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)

1. Download the WAIK from here
2. Strictly speaking not necessary, but you can download the SP1 supplement from here
3. Install it – installation is straight-forward, next – next – done kind of thing

Creating the WinPE boot disk

I used c:\dellwinpe as my wim staging folder, you can change it to suit your environment.

1. Launch an administrative WAIK command prompt (normal command prompt won’t work)
2. copype x86 c:\dellwinpe
3. copy the Dell WinPE driver cab to the c:\dellwinpe folder and extract so that the extracted WinPE folder is under the root of your c:\dellwinpe folder
4. dism /Mount-Wim /WimFile:winpe.wim /index:1 /MountDir:Mount
5. dism /add-driver /driver:"winpe" /image:"mount" /recurse
6. dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:"mount" /commit
7. dism /mount-wim /wimfile:"winpe.wim" /index:1 /mountdir:"mount"

Now we add a couple of packages necessary for SCCM integration and deployment

1. dism /image:"mount" /add-package /packagepath:"C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\amd64\WinPE_FPs\WinPE-Scripting.cab"
2. dism /image:"mount" /add-package /packagepath:"C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\amd64\WinPE_FPs\WinPE-WMI.cab"
3. dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:"mount" /commit

There will now be a file called winpe.wim in your c:\dellwinpe folder, ready to be imported into SCCM as a boot image.