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I don't have a current answer for Windows 10, but I have made WinPE stuff for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. (So far I have not had to make a WinPE for Windows 10).
 
To do this I downloaded the 'adksetup' tool from Microsoft and you specify the Windows version that you like.
The WinPe is not that useful without something to run so this is usually a precursor to making an application boot rescue disk for Acronis or Macrium Reflect or whatever.
 
The setup will allow you to load custom drivers for specific hardware, but I think the generic drivers are enough for USB, SATA and simple networking to work on any modern system.
 
I have never modified the drivers and I have run such WinPE systems stored on USB drives on many different machines.
 
I use YUMI to store the WinPE-based ISO on a Flash Drive along with many other ISOs.
 
For example, I always keep a USB 3 Flash drive in my desktop mounted as a B: drive.
It contains many boot applications for debugging and troubleshooting.
Among the many ISOs on it are these:
 
AcronisBootableMedia-2016-6559.iso
AcronisBootableMedia-Linux-ATI2016-6027.iso
AcronisBootableMedia-Linux-DD12-3270.iso
AcronisBootableMedia-WinPE10-Universal Restore.iso
AcronisBootablePEMedia-6571.iso
AcronisBootablePEMedia-ATI-6569.iso
 
These are all portable as far as I know. Some are Linux-boot-based, some are WinPE-boot-based.
 
The Linux tools are good for when you need to hack into protected system files or mount hidden partitions, etc. But the WinPE are better at keeping Drives with the correct (standard) letters.

Thanks for explaining.
 
I do not understand how the .iso files work on your USB stick. I have thought that an .iso was a sort of agnostic container which can store the image of an entire disk's content, (for example; useful as an interim format when cloning CD ROMs) so I am having trouble imaging how having a collection of .iso files on bootable media is useful. I can imagine how a collection of .exe files can be useful.
 
Does the WinPE stick see the .iso files as a collection of bootable disks?
 
Thank you.
 

An ISO is an image file that sees most of its use as being a way to store a disc (CD, DVD) image that can be used to recreate the disc. But it is also mountable as a "virtual" disc on a computer. Yumi includes bootable software that is able to mount those iso's so the computer sees them as if they were disc's. WinPE is basically a Windows installer application that contains a subset of Windows functions. After booting and loading into memory, you are basically using a version of Windows to run applications. If your system has special requirements for drivers, you must load them in order to use those devices, just as you would if you were installing Windows. A standard Windows installation includes built in drivers for common devices, but if you are trying to install Windows to a RAID array, for example, and the driver for the array is not in the library on the installation disc, you have to pause the installer until you install those drivers, or the (Windows Preinstallation Environment) aka Win PE will not know how to write to your RAID.

To understand ISO you need to understand the old boot process.
 
Older BIOS (pre-EFI) had hard-coded simple boot loaders that loaded the first sector off of a hard drive or other media. These bootstrap loaders would run and they had more smarts to load the Windows loader, which in turn loaded Windows. These loaders, if they knew anything about a file system, it would have been FAT.
 
So disks had MBR formatting on the partition table and CDs and DVDs had ISO formatting.
 
Nowadays, EFI boot proms understand NTFS and can have much more elaborate handling of file systems.
 
So, in a nutshell, an ISO image is a CD/DVD drive format that usually is able to run from BIOS.
 
Nowadays, it's also another type of file archive format that can be mounted as a file system (ie, get's its own drive letter).
 
Often software vendors use it to install large applications. Sometimes you even see Windows and Apple installs on the same image.
 
Flash drives (and all removable media) can not have partitions (unless you resort to special stuff). So they require something like FAT32 boot loading usually. You can't mount and eject file systems. At least not in Windows.
 
YUMI is a FAT32 application with a syslinux boot loader with enough smarts to display a menu and run some simple scripts. It can load certain types of file and supports ISO and CASPER file systems and maybe a few others.
 
Typically one could use it to boot a Linux LiveCD, a Kaspersky rescue disk, or any other number of recovery utilities when your normal boot doesn't work.
 
I use it to store all my recovery utilities on a single device. Run the application that makes an ISO file and you can use YUMI to boot that from a flash drive. I also boot to Linux with it.
 
There is no practical limit to the number of applications - most ISOs are under 4 GB so you could easily fit 10 or 20 on a 64 GB flash drive. So I keep older versions along with newer ones.
 
And slow flash is hundreds of times faster than fast CDs and DVDs.
 
Everyone should use YUMI (or one of the equivalents).
 
 
 

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Caa2
Can, and if so how, can I use Macrium Reflect Free and Paragon Backup and Recovery 16 with YUMI? Can I use each to make bootable media and then somehow make an .iso of the bootable media and then place the .iso on a YUMI USB stick?

You should be able to do what you describe, although the only advantage over the bootable CD that you create would be to make a convenient package on a flash drive. The "somehow" I would recommend is the free program ImgBurn http://www.imgburn.com/ . That program will let you read or write a disc to or from a disc to iso image. Yumi would then point your computer at the desired iso and if the disc from which it is made is bootable so should the iso be. These programs probably expect to actually write to a physical disc via a DVD writer and so they are going to set up files to be read from a DVD burner. The file setup on a bootable flash drive is different than a bootable disc and the program that is set up to add bootable features for the particular medium you choose, and I very much doubt they can write bootable versions to an iso directly.
 
If you do not want to go through the process of creating a bootable disc, and want to go directly from the program to the iso without the intermediate round plastic thingy, say you do not have access to a disc burner for example, you might try TotalMounter 
http://www.techsupportale...ner-thats-easy-use.htm
This supposedly will create a virtual burner on your machine that other programs capable of burning discs will recognize as an actual DVD burner and "burn" content to an iso instead of a physical disc. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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