My WinPE

Description

This my personal Windows PE (WinPE) build. It primarily reflects my personal interests. It never intends to compete with those Linux LiveCDs, nor does it want to substitute for wepe, 老毛桃winpe or Hiren's BootCD.

Utilities include:

• bbLean that establishs an old-school user interface
• busybox that yields some unix feel
• Double Commander that replaces explorer.exe. I am including it because you can edit text files, read binary file in hex format, view images with this awesome utility.
• TestDisk and PhotoRec 7.2 that covers disk and file recovery
• Offline NT Password & Registry Editor that comes to rescue if you have to unlock your accidentally locked local Windows account or even blank its password. You will need a Windows version.

Notice Due to the mechanism of winpeshl.exe, you need to terminate the last running process listed in %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\winpeshl.ini to reboot. For my build, that is bbLean/Blackbox. To do so, right click the desktop and locate Blackbox > Quit.

Screenshots

Use cases

Unlock bitlocker

Assume you have backed up your bitlocker keys/passwords in advance, you can unlock with

manage-bde -unlock D: -rk E:\path\to\your\key

or

manage-bde -unlock D: -rp YOUR-BITLOCKER-PASSWORD

Download pre-built image

Please check release page.

Tools like ventoy could help you write the image to a flashdisk.

Please do not blame me if the repo burns your house or drives your pets mad. The configs, recipes and scripts are made public in the hope that they would be usefull, but I take no responsibility for anything you do with this repo and its consequences.

There are also legal concerns. If it bothers you, please open an issue.

• It is not clear whether it is legal to redistribute Windows PE images, the 3rd-parth utilites (especially the proprietary ones) and the Shizuku wallpaper. Including shizuku images violates rules in 壁紙について. Distributed iso images will not include them.

How to build the WinPE image

You probably need a legal copy of Windows to proceed. Generally, you should follow these steps:

1. Install ADK and ADK Windows PE Addon. Follow this documention on ADK and this on creating bootable media.
2. Open a terminal with administrative privilege and run C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Deployment Tools\DandISetEnv.bat.
3. Run copype amd64 WinPE_amd64.
4. Check and modify my-winpe.cmd. Obtain the utilities you need. Then run my-winpe.cmd.
5. Optionally test your image in a virtual machine.
6. Write it to a flash disk with MakeWinPEMedia /ufd WinPE_amd64 J: (assuming your flash disk has drive letter J).

Notice The partition table of your flash disk has to be MBR, otherwise MakeWinPEMedia /ufd would fail.

Instead of running MakeWinPEMedia /ufd WinPE_amd64 J:, you can try the ventoy method as well.

Other useful links

The Arch Wiki page on Windows PE: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Windows_PE