Walkthrough: Boot WinPE on a USB Thumbdrive

I was in a bind. I had onhand, a Lenovo X200 which I was trying to install a Vista image on. But this unit had neither a built-in nor an external CD or DVD drive. And all I had my trusted {Insiders} USB thumbdrive:



The WinPE image I was using to boot up is in an ISO format. I used MagicISO to mount the ISO file to access the image's folder structure and its files. Once I had the files and folders ready, I had to do the following steps to be able to boot from my USB thumbdrive:

1. list disk - displays disk information including disk number, size, and status
2. select disk x - focuses all subsequent commands on a particular disk
3. clean - cleans and removes all configuration information from the disk
4. create partition primary - create a partition (of type primary in our example)
5. list partition - displays partition information of the disk in focus
6. select partition y - moves the focus to the partition y
7. active - marks the partition in focus as the active boot partition
8. format fs=fat32 - formats the active partition with the FAT32 file system
9. assign - assigns a drive letter (the next available one) to the disk

I then copied mounted my WinPE ISO and copied the files/folders to the USB thumbdrive. And off I go, booting up WinPE from my {Insiders} USB thumbdrive.