Creating boot WinPE ISO from USB drive with min. disk space+factory reset prtn. info

[chants]

Another interesting nuance is that if your ISO will have files > 4GB inside of it, then it will not be capable of being deployed to a USB drive later with FAT32 but will require NTFS which supports large files.

In the case of NTFS, a tool like rufus which is one of the best to put an ISO on a USB drive, will get errors if your ISO contains the:

$RECYCLE.BIN
"System Volume Information"

files due to having already formatted for NTFS which creates those files with security permissions set. Even running rufus as admin will not help. So the solution: do not put these 2 NTFS specific and controlled folders into your ISO. Without those, an ISO should be deployable to NTFS just fine. The other NTFS special files are not even visible to the file system at all so they do not matter - only a tool like winhex can see them. But these 2 in particular can cause problems. But specifically in practice, "System Volume Information" is the one which will cause problems, $RECYCLE.BIN is optional - the permissions are not strict there are in practice it writes out fine.

Extracting: F:\$RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-5-21-2268161641-1247138040-2706703942-1001\desktop.ini (129 bytes)
Extracting: F:\$RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-5-21-3434372678-3681868793-1947244583-1001\desktop.ini (129 bytes)
Extracting: F:\$RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-5-21-824727643-1572714910-144252577-1002\desktop.ini (129 bytes)
Extracting: F:\$RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-5-21-824727643-1572714910-144252577-500\desktop.ini (129 bytes)
Extracting: F:\System Volume Information\Chkdsk\Chkdsk20170601211123.log (7 KB)
Unable to create file: [0x00000003] The system cannot find the path specified.

Unfortunately OSCDIMG does not allow exclusions. So the options are to either to delete those 2 folders before image creation (which might require copying the whole file set if the source is read only), or using a tool like PowerISO which can rewrite the ISO with those directories deleted. There is an option to ignore files that cannot be accessed without failing in OSCDIMG (-k) however as well as not specifying the hidden files option (-h) but you will need the hidden files for booting and at least you will want to know if there are access issues beyond "System Volume Information" so you can take ownership and add permissions and get those files before making the final ISO. But those would both be valid workarounds but only in the right context where you do not need a bootable image or any hidden files or there are no permission issues beyond "System Volume Information".

Lastly according to Microsoft, if the image will be greater than 4.5GB, you should create a boot order file that makes the boot files at the start of the drive so the loader can find them. This option is specified as

-yoC:\temp\bootOrder.txt

while the file bootOrder.txt contains along the lines of:

boot\bcd
boot\boot.sdi
boot\bootfix.bin
boot\bootsect.exe
boot\etfsboot.com
boot\memtest.efi
boot\memtest.exe
boot\en-us\bootsect.exe.mui
boot\fonts\chs_boot.ttf
boot\fonts\cht_boot.ttf
boot\fonts\jpn_boot.ttf
boot\fonts\kor_boot.ttf
boot\fonts\wgl4_boot.ttf
sources\boot.wim