When Building a Windows UEFI system there are a few things to know that are different from when building an old BIOS based machine. First your USB install stick has be be formatted with FAT32 and Not NTFS. Second your UEFI motherboard probably has a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) mode that is set for BIOS compatibility. You need to turn that off if you want to enable UEFI, Secure Boot, and booting from a GPT partitioned disk.

The 11 steps for manually preparing / building a USB Disk to be a bootable Win 8.1 Install.
This bootable USB stick will work for both older BIOS installs as well as the newer UEFI installs.

1. Diskpart (Run from a CMD prompt)
2. List Disk
3. Select Disk # (Where # is the number of your USB disk)
4. Clean (removes any partitions on the USB disk, including any hidden sectors)
5. Create Partition Primary (Creates a new primary partition with default parameters)
6. Select Partition 1 (Focus on the newly created partition)
7. Active (Sets the selected partition to an active valid system partition state)
8. Format FS=fat32 quick (Formats the partition with the FAT32 file system. FAT32 is needed instead of NTFS so that it can load under the secure boot UEFI BIOS.)
9. Assign (Assigns the USB drive a drive letter)
10. Exit
11. Copy all the files from the Windows 8.1 DVD to the USB Stick.

For More information on on UEFI and Installing Windows to these machines here are some links:

For more information on UEFI BIOS and Secure Boot in Windows 8.1
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-security/uefi-secure-boot-in-windows-81/65d74e19-9572-4a91-85aa-57fa783f0759

Installing Windows on UEFI-based Computers
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh290675(v=WS.10).aspx#BootingUEFImode

First off we need to download the latest .exe for Java. I tend to get it through Oracle’s site as you get a better listing and can obtain earlier versions/the JDK (Java Development Kit) if you want it as well. Any who, Java comes in 3 flavours:

 

1. JDK – Java Development Kit
2. Server JRE – “Server Java Runtime Environment” Doesn’t include the web plugins but allows you to run RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications)
3. JRE – Java Runtime Environment (The stock standard app you’ll pick up to distribute on your network)

 

Obtain the version you require from here: http://bit.ly/jdkjre

Once you’ve chosen your flavour, accepted the license agreement and downloaded the Windows x86 Offline version “jre-7uXX-windows-i586.exe” where XX is whatever update they are up to. (~30MB) you can open the .exe with admin rights.

Once it pops up with the java installer window you will find hidden under “%userprofile%\appdata\locallow\Sun\Java” the Java .msi. You can get there by copying and pasting that into a run prompt. Copy the latest Java folder to your server share (mine was jre1.7.0_45) and don’t worry about the Deployment folder. Within this java folder is an .MSI and .cab. We now need to make a transform so the Java Update utility doesn’t annoy users.

Using either Orca or instEd to create an .MSI transform, under the property table set:

• AUTOUPDATECHECK      0 (turns off looking for updates)
• ENDDIALOG       0 (Turns off install finished notice)
• IEXPLORER          1 (Installs to IE)
• JAVAUPDATE     0 (Turns off updating)
• JU           0 (Turns off updating)
• MOZILLA              1 (Install to firefox)
• RebootYesNo    0 (Stops auto restart after install)

 

Once that’s all done and you’ve generated/saved your Transform to the network shared Java folder, load up Microsoft’s Group Policy Management console and right click on the Organisational Unit (OU)  that you’ve added your network computers to and select “Create a GPO…”

Name the policy “Java 7uXX” or whatever you would like it to be named, then under:

“Computer Configuration – Policies – Software Settings – Software Installation”

right click in the right hand window, or on the software installation icon and choose “New… – Package”. Find the Java folder you put on your server and select the .MSI and choose “Advanced” as the deployment method.

Once the panel opens up, go to the Modifications tab and select Add. Locate your Transform and click Ok. The package will now be loaded into MS GPO and you can exit out of the window as it is already saved.

 

To delete the Start Menu icons run this script at shutdown (or startup) (.bat)

@echo off

if exist "%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Java" (
    rmdir "%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Java" /s /q
)

In terms of uninstallation download the JavaUninstall.bat file. This will uninstall Java up to version:

• 8.0
• 7u51
• 6u71
• 5u23
• 1.4.2_19
• 1.3.1_25

 

Uninstall Script + SuperJRE Download:

JavaUninstall.bat:  http://bit.ly/jreUninstall
SuperJRE (All Java 7 updates with Transform – 439.04MB): http://www.mediafire.com/download/crlxvyq7vdceas0/SuperJRE.zip
JRE Installations per version (~30MB):

JRE 7u51.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_51
JRE 7u45.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_45
JRE 7u40.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_40_1
JRE 7u25.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_25
JRE 7u21.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_21
JRE 7u17.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_17
JRE 7u15.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_15
JRE 7u13.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_13
JRE 7u11.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_11
JRE 7u10.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_10
JRE 7u09.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_09
JRE 7u07.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_07
JRE 7u06.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_06
JRE 7u05.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_05
JRE 7u04.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_04
JRE 7u03.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_03
JRE 7u02.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_02
JRE 7u01.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_01
JRE 7u00.zip (MSI+CAB+Transform) : http://bit.ly/jre170_00