Best Practices

Can I ask a dumb question (now you say, "Better than anyone I know" J )?

I would like to better understand the KBE and WinPE versions used to create it. 

Our setup - K2000 physical appliance running version 3.7.  Windows 7 fleet (approx. 5000 PCs) with a Win8.1 image to be developed later this year.  We deploy a customised system image (WIM).

Questions

1) When building a KBE, do you need to use WinPE 3, 4 or 5?  So far, this has been my understanding;

WinPE 3 – Windows 7

WinPE4 – Windows 8

WinPE5 – Windows 8.1

My understanding has been confused somewhat lately by articles that refer different versions to deploy different OSes.  For example, I have read that WinPE5 can in fact deploy Windows 7??  Does the version of WinPE NOT matter as long as you have the right drivers for the OS you deploy?

2) Once you have built the KBE, does moving/deleting drivers from the <kbox\drivers\kbe_windows_xXX> directory matter?  Are these files still referenced during the boot to KBE/imaging process?  This may be an odd question and you may be wondering why you would delete these files.  Let’s just say…..someone made a boo boo and the files are no longer there.  Does that matter?

3) Once the KBE is built, can you extract the files within it if the above situation happened?  Can you get the drivers out of the KBE and restore them?

4) Are you able to customise the KBE so that additional tools are not installed?  For example, 99.9% of the time, we simply want machines to boot to the KBE and start imaging.  We don’t want (or need) DOS tools, recovery tools etc etc.  Can I remove things and therefore make the KBE even smaller reducing the time it takes to load?  When we are doing 2000 PCs in a week that can really help!

Hopefully these questions are not too dumb.  Fact is, I’m not sure of the answers so, dumb or not, I needed to ask.  Many thanks for your assistance.

Hoodathunkut.