Windows Vista - Tuesday, January 1, 2008 10:54 - 0 Comments

Breaking into a command prompt in Windows PE

How to open a command prompt during the Windows PE phase of Windows Setup for Vista.
 
When the Windows PE phase of Windows Setup is running, you can break into a command prompt window running under Local System context by pressing SHIFT+F10. This is cool because it lets you view Setup logs and run commands like regedit, diskpart, robocopy and other stuff. And you can even do other neat stuff like popping in a USB flash disk that has some additional tools on it you want to use.
 
On the other hand, if you’re an admin deploying Vista workstations in an enterprise, you may not want users to break into a command prompt when Windows PE launches on their computers. Fortunately Microsoft also provides a way for you to prevent this from happening, see KB 929839 at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/929839 for more info.

Article written by MyComputerAid.com