Windows 7: Mini W7 from USB is it possible

Hi all
Is it possible to create a mini Windows 7 which will run as a "Live Windows distribution" from a USB.

It was possible to do this with Windows XP -- one could "nLite" XP and run a build as per Hirens boot CD -- note that that CD contains some "Unauthorized software" or at least the earlier releases did so take care if using that CD.

Anyone got any experience with creating Windows images with MS's official tools.

My aim is to make a proper LEGAL recovery USB with my own licensed software on it.

I started by installing vmware on a Linux Mint distro and booting up a virtual XP machine but this isn't the most satisfactory way of doing this.

IMO a sort of "Mini Windows 7" usb would be a very useful recovery tool and would remain current -- XP itself will soon be as dead as the Dinosaurs.

Cheers
jimbo

That's exactly what the WinPE 2.0 (Vista) and 3.0 (Windows 7) environments are for, which you can download for free as Windows Automated Installation Kit or WAIK.

Alas, it's not a full Windows and lacks several OS components which means software can't simply be installed on it...it has to be made for the WinPE .wim image and be integrated into the .wim before creating a bootable .iso or USB stick from it.

I would actually love to "clone" my desktop Windows system to an USB stick and be able to boot that clone on its own...one day I might try this just for kicks. The thing of course would be that it would only work on my specific desktop machine...WinPE is designed to run on anything.

SIW2 did a lot of work in making a version of win 7 pe in both x86 and x64 bit flavours.

works very well too!

Look into Windows To Go for Windows 8 . It does this already, and I do this for client demos all the time. It's really quite slick!

Yeah, but I wanna do this with 7.

Hi there
The tool doesn't seem to be available in the current version of Developer Edition -- seems to have been removed --it existed in the previous build 79xx but I don't have that one any more --so what tool did you use or how did you do the build via alternate methods.

The link you point to is just a wiki that doesn't really contain any useful info.

Cheers
jimbo

What applications do you want to run from the Windows 7 Live Disk?