Hi there! I've been struggling with this problem for a while now and finially decided to ask for help. Let me first explain what the main purpose of the app is: to provide the a very easy to use way of backing up files, after which I format the drive and start Windows 7 setup.

I do this by booting WinPE, which runs a script to detect Windows installations and then opens a file browser. After the file browser is closed, the script continues and formats the drive that contains the Windows installation, and starts an unattended Windows 7 install. Now here is the problem:

When you start Windows setup or WinPE from a dvd, you get a nice option to "Press any key to boot from DVD". This is to prevent the computer from booting the DVD when the first phase of the installation is complete and the computer reboots. However, when booting from a flash drive, Windows does not provide this option: it simply boots the flash drive every reboot.

To replicate the "press any key" function, I installed Grub4Dos, which works great. It provides a small menu, the first standard item being "Continue installation", the second being "start installation". After quite a lot of tweaking, I got everything working: Start installation starts WinPE, which in turn starts the Windows installation. At first reboot, the Grub4Dos menu comes up, counts 5 seconds and boots the second stage of the installation. Here, I am greeted with the error:

"Windows setup could not configure windows to run on this computer's hardware."

When I boot into WinPE the normal way (put the bootmgr on the stick root) and change my bios to boot from the primary hdd after first reboot, I don't get this error.

I've been looking around, and the only thing I could find was that the BIOS automatically names the boot device hd0, and that Windows can only be run / installed to hd 0. I'm not sure if this is the problem. I read about remapping to solve this problem, but to do that you have to know the phisical location of the hard drive and partition, like hd(0,1). I want this flash drive to work on any PC, regardless of where the OS is installed, so that's not really a possibility.

A possible fix I thought of is removing the bootloader from the flash drive when I'm in WinPE. That way, when the pc reboots the BIOS will not see the flash drive as a boot drive and instead boot the primary hdd. I have yet to find a way to do this.

Thank you for reading my question, and if you have any suggestion, please do.