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Boot a Device into WinPE

When to use this

You have a built boot image (see guide 2) and need to get a target device running it. Pick the delivery method that fits the situation:

Method Use when Don't use when
USB drive One device, branch office, ad-hoc reimage Imaging dozens of devices in parallel
ISO Booting a VM, IPMI/iLO/iDRAC virtual media, Hyper-V Physical bare-metal — needs more setup
PXE / network boot Lab, rack, classroom — many devices at once No DHCP/TFTP infrastructure available

Option A — Boot from USB

Why USB

Simplest path. One stick is enough to reimage any number of devices sequentially. The USB also gives you an NTFS data partition for logs, scripts, and a USB startup profile (see guide 6).

How

New-OSDeployBootUSB

Pick:

  1. The completed build to copy.
  2. Which media folder (bootmedia or bootmedia_ca2023).
  3. The target USB disk (7 GB minimum).

The function wipes the disk, creates a FAT32 boot partition (OSDEPLOY) and an NTFS data partition (OSDCloud), then copies the WinPE files.

To refresh an existing OSDCloud USB without repartitioning:

Update-OSDeployBootUSB

Then on the target device: power on, F12/F10/Esc into the boot menu, select the USB device. UEFI mode is required.

Option B — Boot from ISO

Why ISO

Best for VMs and out-of-band management consoles (iDRAC, iLO, IPMI, Hyper-V, VMware). No USB hardware involved.

How

The ISO is already produced by Build-OSDeployBoot — use one of:

  • bootmedia.iso for normal Secure Boot.
  • bootmedia_ca2023.iso when the device's Secure Boot policy requires the 2023 UEFI CA boot manager (most 2024+ devices once the 2023 CA is enrolled).

Mount the ISO through your hypervisor or management controller and boot from virtual CD.

Option C — PXE / network boot

Why PXE

Best for high-volume deployment: racks, classrooms, training labs. No USB handling between devices.

How

OSDeploy doesn't ship a PXE server. Use the boot files produced by Build-OSDeployBoot:

  1. Stand up a PXE service (Windows Deployment Services, iPXE, dnsmasq, etc.).
  2. Publish the contents of the build's bootmedia\ folder.
  3. Point PXE clients at bootmgfw.efi (UEFI) and boot\boot.wim as the WinPE source.

Detailed PXE setup varies by infrastructure and is out of scope for OSDCloud.

After WinPE boots

Whichever boot method you used, WinPE loads to an X:\Windows\System32 command prompt or directly into the OSDCloud startup sequence depending on how the boot image was customized. Continue with guide 4 — Deploy Windows 11.