Using bootable Virtual Hard Drive as Media instead of USB Drive/DVD Disk

Installing commercial software having embedded OS  such as WES7 or Win10IOT, uses various types of media such as CD/DVD or USB. This is mainly because of deployment of custom Operating system. These type of installations cannot be automated because of  need of manual operations such as boot options, bios password etc.

A bootable Virtual Hard Disk( VHD) provides a perfect solution. Following describes the process in detail.
1. Duplicate the USB disk image into a Virtual Hard disk. For example, The VHD contains two partitions. The first is bootable partition containing WinPE OS. The second is Service Disk containing license files.

2. Load the OS

The OS Image in an USB has following structure:

The sources folder contains the boot.wim which is loaded by the OS. However for the VHD, the entire boot.wim should be extracted into the bootable drive.

In addition, customization of the scripting may be required for correct deployment. It can be done starting with modifying windows\system32\startnet.cmd file. This script is first that is executed.

3.Adding boot entry and make it default.
The last step is to add an boot entry to the VHD file. After adding the entry system is rebooted. The system loads bootable VHD drive and loads the WinPE OS the same way in case of an USB drive.
bcdboot u:\windows
Boot files successfully created.
bcdedit /set {default} description "Some App 1.0"
The operation completed successfully.

4.Reboot the system

After the system restarts, the system will automatically select the bootable vhd to start.

Source and Binaries can be found here.