One thing I would like to do with a USB hard drive is to make either a single boot PE environment to install any one of the flavors of Windows XP or make a multi-boot environment to install any one of the flavors of Windows XP. I'm thinking the best way to go is to grab source disks for each flavor of XP and make a .wim file to use via ImageX, but I remember seeing something on the Internet that can allow for one or more versions of Windows XP to be installed off a USB disk. Which way would be the best for me to go and can someone point me to resources that I can use to build the environment myself on my USB hard drive. My goal is to be able to boot, image, and install software and drivers off one USB drive instead of having to hunt for CDs or software on the Internet. The only requirement that I have for the image is that after the image goes down, all the user needs to do is activate Windows.

There are several approaches:
with direct USB boot install. And PE booting first.

Read sticky http://www.msfn.org/board/forum/157-instal...ndows-from-usb/
and http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/140351-ins...ly-about-500mb/