- \n
- Build a PowerShell-Enabled Windows PE Key: Part 1<\/a>
Install the Windows ADK and validate its presence with Windows PowerShell<\/li>\n- Build a PowerShell-Enabled Windows PE Key: Part 2<\/a>
Customize a Windows PE environment to contain Windows PowerShell and DISM modules<\/li>\n- Build a PowerShell-Enabled Windows PE Key: Part 3<\/a>
Identify available USB keys and make them bootable devices<\/li>\n- Build a PowerShell-Enabled Windows PE Key: Part 4<\/a>
Build out the necessary file structure for a Windows PE environment<\/li>\n- Build a PowerShell-Enabled Windows PE Key: Part 5<\/a>
Populate a bootable USB key with content from Windows PE<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nWith Windows PowerShell finding a USB key is actually quite easy. We just use the Get-Disk<\/b> cmdlet. This will show us all disks on the computer. There is a property we can filter on called BusType<\/b>. A USB key is on the BusType<\/b> called USB<\/b>, conveniently enough. We can filter it in this way:<\/p>\n
Get-Disk | Where-Object { $_.BusType –eq ‘USB’ }<\/p>\n
Now let’s play my favorite game, “what if.” What if there was more than one USB key or drive attached? How could you choose?<\/p>\n
We can pipe the output to Out-Gridview<\/b> and use the –passthru<\/b> parameter. This will output a simple list of all the USB keys, including their sizes, to allow you to choose.<\/p>\n
Get-Disk | Where-Object { $_.BusType –eq ‘USB’ } | Out-Gridview –passthru<\/p>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net\/media\/TNBlogsFS\/prod.evol.blogs.technet.com\/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles\/00\/00\/00\/76\/18\/8475.1.PNG\" "\\"Image")
<\/a><\/p>\nNow that we have an easy way to select the USB keys, we can store this away in a PowerShell object we’ll call $Disk<\/b>:<\/p>\n
$Disk= Get-Disk | Where-Object { $_.BusType –eq ‘USB’ } | Out-Gridview –passthru<\/p>\n
The next task is to clear away any partitions on the key. Normally Clear-Disk<\/b> should work, but I’ve experienced some issues in which I’ve had to purge the partition table first. To properly eradicate all data on the USB key, I use a combination of Clear-Disk<\/b> and Remove-Partition<\/b>. I add SilentlyContinue<\/b> to ErrorAction<\/b> in case the key has already been purged.<\/p>\n
Get-Disk -Number ($Disk.number) | Get-Partition | Remove-partition -confirm:$false -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Clear-Disk -Number $Disk.Number -RemoveData -RemoveOEM -confirm:$false -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue<\/p>\nNow that the key has been purged of data, we can begin creating a bootable key. We’re going to assign a temporary drive letter of Z to the USB key.<\/p>\n
We first initialize the USB key we selected earlier and stored in $Disk<\/b>:<\/p>\n
Initialize-Disk -Number $Disk.Number -PartitionStyle MBR -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue<\/p>\n
We then create a single partition to store the data. The –UseMaximum<\/b> parameter will assign all available space to the partition on the USB key. –IsActive<\/b> marks it as an active partition for booting.<\/p>\n
$OSDrive=’Z’
$Partition=New-Partition -DiskNumber $Disk.Number -DriveLetter $OSDrive -UseMaximumSize –IsActive<\/p>\nWe format this as Fat32<\/b> because we our planning for the ability of booting in a modern UEFI platform. UEFI does not recognize NTFS as a filesystem for booting.<\/p>\n
Format-Volume -Partition $Partition -FileSystem FAT32 -NewFileSystemLabel 'Windows'<\/p>\n
Now we have the ability to create a bootable USB key with a selectable menu. Neat, eh?<\/p>\n
Pop in tomorrow as we look into starting to build out the file structure needed for the Windows PE environment!<\/p>\n
I invite you to follow the Scripting Guys on Twitter<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>. If you have any questions, send email to them at scripter@microsoft.com<\/a>, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum<\/a>. See you tomorrow. Until then always remember that with great PowerShell comes great responsibility.<\/p>\n
Sean Kearney<\/b>, Honorary Scripting Guy, Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summary: Identify available USB keys and make them bootable devices. Honorary Scripting Guy, Sean Kearney, is here to continue delving into having a cool PowerShell experience in a Windows PE environment. Today I’m going to show you how to use Windows PowerShell to identify USB keys and make them bootable devices. Note This is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":596,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,3,154,649,45],"class_list":["post-75331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-guest-blogger","tag-scripting-guy","tag-sean-kearney","tag-windows-pe","tag-windows-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
Summary: Identify available USB keys and make them bootable devices. Honorary Scripting Guy, Sean Kearney, is here to continue delving into having a cool PowerShell experience in a Windows PE environment. Today I’m going to show you how to use Windows PowerShell to identify USB keys and make them bootable devices. Note This is […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Build a PowerShell-Enabled Windows PE Key: Part 2<\/a>