Windows Preinstallation Environment

  • Article

5/10/2007

Microsoft® Windows® Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE), provides a small but powerful boot environment that you can use for many Windows XP Embedded development tasks. Windows PE is included on Disk 1 of the Windows XP Embedded Installation media or as a separate Windows PE disc, depending on whether you have the Full Price Product or the Upgrade Product. Windows PE provides the following features:

  • A hardware-independent Windows environment with a small footprint both on the bootable media and in memory.
  • A subset of the Win32 application programming interfaces (APIs), a command-line interface (Cmd.exe) capable of running batch files, and support for Windows Script Host (WSH), HTML Applications (HTA), and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) used to create custom tools or scripts.
  • Network access and support for standard in-box network drivers that may be required for copying images and test suites from a network that uses TCP/IP.
  • Support for all mass-storage devices that use Windows 2000 or Windows XP drivers.
  • Native support to create, delete, format, and manage NTFS file system partitions.
  • Hardware diagnostics to load and test specific hardware drivers.

Note

The version of Windows PE included with Windows XP Embedded cannot be updated or configured. You must purchase a licensed version of Windows PE to add custom support. For information, contact your Microsoft distributor.

See Also

Tasks

Booting with Windows PE
Connecting a Device to a Network with Windows PE

Other Resources

Development with Windows PE
Detect Hardware Devices with Target Analyzer and Windows PE