How to make a PE boot from a hard drive

This process works very well with a USB hard drive as long as you follow some basic steps. I have done it with USB pendrives as well but it tends to only work with some drives. For the size of the partition I have had the best luck with setting them as Fat and no bigger than 3 GB. Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and enter the following commands diskpart list disk select disk 1 (where 1 is you will need to select your USB hard drive) clean disk (THIS WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON THE DISK!) create partition primary size=3000 list partition select partition 1 format fs=fat select partition 1 (Some systems lose the selected partition during the format process and this selects it again) active assign Now we will copy the files we will need for our PE. Replace "C:\PE\winpe_x86\ISO\" and "D:\" with the location of where your PE files are and the location of your USB drive. xcopy C:\PE\winpe_x86\ISO\*.* /e /f D:\