I would suggest having a look at Microsoft's wim image format, imagex and sysprep to get you going with that :)
If you have a wsus server or access to one you can pump the updates into the image too !!!
Iain
ps there are gui's for imagex that make it far more palatable :)
pps you can install windows 8 to a usb key and it will run from that and load drivers in automatically for different systems it works for i.e. portable os ... very impressive !
