One of the great things in Windows Vista (yes there are a few) is the new imaging format that Microsoft introduced, and with that the imaging tool imagex.exe. In short this tool allows you to boot from a special WinPE boot disk to both capture the image and to deploy it to new machines. I won’t go into the details of creating these disks or images, but rather how to use these tools to deploy a Vista image to a MacBook Pro running Leopard and Bootcamp.

First you’ll use the Bootcamp utility in Leopard to create the partition for Vista. I chose a 32GB partition as Vista isn’t going to be the primary OS on this box. After creating the partition reboot using your WinPE disk (I created a DVD that held WinPE and the actual image file – WinPE doesn’t have the network drivers for the MacBook Pro so no loading over the network). Once you get booted into WinPE you’ll need to reformat the drive as NTFS (but don’t change ANYTHING else). You can do this with diskpart:

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(at a command prompt inside WinPE)
diskpart
select disk 0
select partition 3
format fs=ntfs quick
exit
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Once you’re done there you’re now ready to blow the image onto the machine. The general syntax for this is:

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imagex /apply IMAGENAME.wim 1 c:
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For my image it took about 12 minutes to install and be ready to go. When it’s done you’ll need to eject the CD/DVD. To do this as the machine is booting (just as you see the gray Apple screen) press and hold the mouse button until it ejects. Once it ejects you’ll probably boot back into Leopard. Once in Leopard go to System Preferences – Start Up Disk, choose your Windows install and reboot. But there is now a new issue…

For some reason when the image loads it won’t be bootable. So we’ll need an original Vista DVD to fix this. Boot from the Vista DVD and once you get to the installer (after choosing your language) choose Repair my Computer. On my box when I did this it never listed any Vista installs to repair, don’t worry about this it should still work. Once you get to the repair options choose Fix Startup Problems (or something like that). This will run for a few minutes letting you know that it might have fixed things (and hopefully it did). Power down and as you boot back up be sure to press the mouse button again to eject the DVD. You should now boot into Vista for the first time (depending on your image this should be the Vista startup environment). Complete your Vista install as normal (remember the Leopard DVD has the Vista drivers on it so don’t forget to install those).

So I now have Brad’s MacBook Pro happily dual booting between Leopard and my Vista Business image. A huge time saver for me now that I don’t have to manually install Vista and all his apps. Next up, getting Parallels and/or VMWare Fusion to open the Bootcamp partition so I can use the same Vista install inside Leopard, hope that’s easier than this was…