In many Longhorn builds, there are issues with partitioning and formatting disks within the installer. Microsoft DiskPart is a utility included within the Windows Pre-installation Environment that allows you to partition disks from a command line interface.
One common problem faced by people installing Longhorn on modern hardware is the apparent inability to boot from USB drives. As optical media grows rarer, and more and more form factors ship without optical media drives, booting from a disc is not always an option. Fortunately, booting Longhorn through USB can be a surprisingly easy affair once you know what you’re doing.
When using Longhorn, it’s a must to known how to manually install drivers in Windows. The process is basically the same in all versions of Windows, but I thought it couldn’t hurt if I would write up a short tutorial for those people new to installing drivers.
With the new image-based installation introduced in Milestone 4 it was also time for a revamped out-of-box experience (OOBE) wizard. The first build to feature the image-based install and new OOBE wizard is build 4001.
Driver Packages These packages are some extracted drivers from the VMWare Guest Additions. The tools themselves are not compatible with Longhorn, although the drivers themselves maintained compatibility for much longer.