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Sure, you can download and install your own web browser, but IE is always there, sucking up resources, no matter what you do.

Windows explorer and windows media player are removable.

Personally I'd look at these sites Barts PE CD and 911CD They asist you in creating a recovery/util cd for win based systems, dos based utils and even small linux distro (Tomsrtbt). For just finding a good prog for testing hardware sisoft and aida are nice but search tucows nonags etc and you will find freeware progs that have tons of functionality and are not as bloated/intrusive as large name companies software (i.e Norton). Pisnaz

I've removed IE from windows XP. I've removed more than that two.

It also uses some cygwin tools (dd, etc) to make it so that you can create a bootable CD by emulating the creation of a boot floppy via DD, so you can create one w/o the need for an actual floppy (I would recommend hacking it to create 2.88MB floppies rather than 1.44 MB floppies (need to search its config files to handle this)

I used knoppix and it's variants to recover about 180Gig of data just in the last week.

Another one I've found is the BartPE that was here the other day. I build one from a Win2k3 server install disk and tested it, it works reasonable well considering it's a hack ontop of a hack...

The true utility of BartPE is the 3rd party(non-ms and non-bartpe) utils that can be added to it for recovery, AV and cleanup purposes.

Of course, I was rather amazed that it found my network card... but oh well.

Try BartPE if you have to troubleshoot windows systems, you might like it.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

It is not possible to diagnose hardware by running software on it. At best you can determine if there is a hardware failure, but no software will be able to nail it down to a specific component all of the time.

Consider a motherboard failure for instance - a failing motherboard can in effect emulate any other hardware failure - ide controller bad? Your software may blame the hard drive. Bus problems can cause memory checks to fail.

I recommend you carry a simple bootable cdrom that loads the entire system (disk i/o, memory i/o and cpu load) and checks for errors. When a system fails these checks all it tells you is the problem is definately hardware and not a buggy driver or other software issue.

See BartPE for a good free solution.

Who's right? The poster or the faq?

Besides Bart/PE, he's also created SCSITools, a very handy SCSI diagnostics package that, from what I've been able to tell, rivals the functionality and usefulness of the much higher-priced 'niche market' packages.

My one regret is that he didn't include Windows 2000 Pro in his list of supported systems for the bootable CD's. I may try it with such anyway, just to see what happens.

just read some of the other comments that were submitted around the same time I did mine. It seems many are confused about the nature of this software and the relationship of this software package with Windows. At the very bottom of the webpage, it is revealed that although "BartPE" uses GNU software, the authors' original contribution in the package is provided under a propriatary /a> license. It seems BartPE is free beer but not free speech.

If you read the page linked to you'll see that he belives it is completely legal. He steps through the various versions and acknowledges that some of them was in fact illegal in some way or another, but he says that this latest version is completely legal.

OTOH, I am sure that some random guy won't have much of a chance against a horde of MS lawyers if they decide they want to shut him down.

I dont have access to WinPE (thanks to microsoft licensing) and my comment about WinPE was based on the faq from Bart's site.

What is the difference between BartPE and Microsofts WinPE?

* Start-menu; Bart's builder gives you a simple, dynamic and powerful start-menu (Nu2Menu, see screenshots). Microsoft's builder does not give you a start-menu, it uses a command prompt.

So I guess that is wrong as you seem to have actually used WinPE. And no, I was not trying to spread Misinformation.

If any of you were wondering how to do something similar with Windows then now you can! I realise that this being slashdot there are going to be flames about why would you do this etc? For the simple reason that not all porgrams are available on Linux.

Anyway coming back to the topic of how to do this for Windows. Well first of all there is this thing called Windows PE (Pre-installtion Environment) which is basically a Microsoft created bootable Windows CD for computer OEMs. Its basically a very stripped down version of Windows XP (or Win2K3) with just a command prompt and the ability to run some simple GUI programs. But this WinPE is normally only available to OEMs and system builders (but it isn't hard to find online retailers for it). However WinPE isn't very useful from a full usable system point of view. So someone has come up with a way to make your own customized WinPE like bootable Windows CD. All you need is the instructions and your own Windows CD to do it. Here's where you can find more information -

Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD

Ask yourself this: If SCO wins and starts charging $699.00 per copy for Linux, what's the average user of Linux going to do? Probably switch to a Microsoft product and give spammers another system to use for a DDOE (Distributed Denial of E-mail) zombie.

There is a pattern here: Put in passwords, call it "protection", and allow users to believe they have security, when then don't. For example, Bart's PE Builder allows access to Windows XP systems, and changing the passwords, even when the password to the recovery console is not known. Recovery Manager changes passwords.

As another poster already noted, the official Windows PE is rather spartan and fairly difficult to get much done with. If you need something like this, check out Bart's PE Builder. Awesome, awesome piece of software - it basically lets you build an XP equivalent of Knoppix adding in programs like Ghost, Nero, McAffee AV as plugins. I make a point to keep a copy around the shop - you'd be amazed how many customers problems are solved with a quick boot into a Bart's PE disc and AV + Adaware scan.

Bart's PE Builder - Build your own Bart Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable CD/DVD

There is actually a home-made XP/2003 Knoppix-style CD booter called BartPE. It's great because it can access NTFS volumes to both read and write, plus the Windows interface is more familiar and easier to use for many Windows sysadmins.

Ghost supports EXT2 and EXT3, and if you use sector copy, you can use ReiserFS/UFS/HFS/etc.

Personally, I use Barts Boot cdrom, and ghost over tcp/ip to backup servers/workstations and laptops. I find ghost works great to backup a system that doesnt have an OS or a Partition over the network. Plus I can read .gho files with ghost explorer, incase I need a file off a backup.

If ghost worked under winex or dosemu, then I'd run it under knoppix, but for now, Barts Cdrom does the job.

Problem ONE with computers is the total lack of adequate backups. Yeah yeah Norton Ghost and tar and yeah yeah yeah. Back up a 120GB hard drive with Ghost and a CD-R. My ass.

You're using the wrong tools.

Put the OLD Drive Image 2002 (not the latest version) onto a bootable CDROM with network drivers (using Bart's network boot floppy as a starting point), and you can do disaster recovery by booting the CDROM and backing up to a network share (samba and FreeBSD/linux work well for this). This works unbelievably well. The only thing not backed up (I think) is the drive SID, but there are other tools that can handle this.

(You'll probably also have to tweak the samba config, like " socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=4096", to get around slow dos network transfers.)

Of course, even with compression, you do need to have a large samba share to back up 120GB disks. (If the samba share has a DVD+/-R/RW drive, you can also back up the images to DVD, but you should probably have drive image auto-split the backups into manageable-sized chunks if you do this.)

It looks like the site is down right now, but you should be able to find a google cache.

I can second this. We use Ghost (Dos version only, nothing Ghost is installed on the workstations) and Sysprep with very few problems. We boot with a TCP boot CD (I used bart's for a starting point) pulling from a Samba server. Our DOS boot CD autodetects the type of network card, uses DHCP, and presents you with a menu system for you to pull a new image or backup an existing one to the server. We also have some basic recovery tools available on the mapped Samba drive that can be run on the workstation for reading NTFS from DOS, dos shells for recovery of files, and some partitioning tools for loss recovery. For the imaging, we have used the multicast method supplied with Ghost but not worth the effort IMHO. Our single P3 1GHZ Samba server with a ATA100 5400 rpm drive can sustain roughly 12MBytes/sec out a single eth interface and is more then enough to do 4 to 5 workstations in a reasonable time. Even for 20 or so sets, it took me longer to setup the multicast sessions and get it going then it does now the regular way. If you have a dedicated lab it might be benificial, anything else seems like a waste for multicast. YMMV. We also have a second eth interface on the same Samba machine hooked to a local 16 port switch for imaging off the main network if congestion is a concern, of course it must be moved over to the real network before actually booting it up so it can find and join our domain.
We have 6 different models of computers and so far.. I've got it down to 2 images and only slight modifications required after imaging, one image for our laptop models and one for our desktops. I'm sure I'll eventually get it down to 2 perfectly working images but I am having some problems with sysprep that are inconsistant with the documentation or I simply misunderstand them, mostly with it detecting the wrong hardware and/or installing the wrong drivers for some harware even when I specify a driver path with updated drivers, like the modem and sound on some model laptops. There are numerous docs on this (some very vague) but I have not had time to mess with all the different methods.

Using our sysprep.inf, the computer on inital boot, will boot perform the mini setup (we use the -pnp switch), generate a new SID, join the domain under the correct OU, and will only require us to put in the new computer name and hit enter. We have chosen to name the computers manually but it can pick a random name or pull from a list if desired. Just before imaging, we remove the computer from the domain (suggested by MS) and manually put in some stuff in the runonce section of the registry that will call CMD files to install specific software on initial login that is "machine specific aware" and can not be worked around in other ways.

Using a well configured and tailored default user profile (less setup and config after install per user), sysprep with Ghost, and the DOS boot disk is a great system.

Yes!

I'll second the recommendation for DriveImage 2002 (the DOS version of which, I believe, comes with DriveImage 7.0). Anyway, the MSDOS version of DI 2002 is very/muy/sehr/totemo nice, especially if you put it onto a bootable CDROM with network drivers (so that you can backup partitions to a samba share). The advantage here is that you don't need to install anything to your hard disk, and disaster recovery becomes much simpler (you restore from the image, and do not have to bother reinstalling windows).

(side note: it's best if you create your own bootable CDROM with network drivers. I think the DI 2002 comes with a way of doing so, but I could never get it to work. I found it easier (and better) to use Bart's network boot floppy instructions and make it into a bootable CDROM.)

I use Ghost with a Network boot disk, courtesy of Bart's Network Boot Disk.

I'll have to try out Knoppix for this, though!

I've used Modboot along with Ghost 2002 to perfectly copy Windows XP systems. Drive Image Pro somewhat works, but not always. Ghost has never given me issue.

Modboot is really nice in that you can make a network boot disk for pretty much any network card that was or is in production without much hassle.

...for an estimated retail price of $129, $100 less than the Connectix price of $229

A nice little piece of revisionist history there. The Connectix price was $129 for the last several months. In the two weeks before they completely removed the ability to buy the product, it dropped to $119. The day before I made up my mind to buy it, Microsoft took it off the market.

Why didn't I pick VMWare? Choice #1 was upgrading my Win98 machine to XP, and buying VPC ($90+$119). Choice #2 was upgrading my Win98 to Linux and buying VMWare ($24+$300). In the end a friend who is a Microsoft employee gave me a copy of XP Pro from their corporate store which cost them $20, making choice #1 even cheaper!

IMHO VMWare is just too expensive for home users like me. Their price is comparable to buying a whole new machine. (They used to have a $99 home edition which they dumped).

I also detest the VMWare support. I have a bootdisk (Bart's BootDisk) that has booted on every real machine I have as well as several friends' machines, and VPC. It just crashes under VMWare. VMWare also doesn't understand dual monitors (try making a window go full screen).

I duly entered support issues for these at the VMWare support site and never got any form of response. I should also mention that I tried VMWare on another machine and it just refused to run claiming my license key was invalid. I think it is due to some anti-piracy broadcast on the network scheme they have going. Of course they never answered my support requests, nor could I try it on another machine.

So VPC it is for me when Microsoft will finally agree to take my money.

You might think about This CD for windows.... I used Knoppix all the time, but the lack of good NTFS support in linux constantly gets me down. This guy is XP/2003 based, and does pretty much the same thing. You can virus scan too, which windows loves.

You don't need Linux for a one-CD bootable rescue disc. Windows can do the same, just get PE Builder which will create such a CD for you (providing you own a Windows license of course). In any case it sounds like a good way to avoid the SCO inquisition.

Doh. forgot to link.

> Try to get one that will let you mount SMB shares from DOS.
Is that even possible? Do you have any idea what I would go through to obtain such a disk?

There is a section at bootdisk.com for network enabled bootdisks. I haven't tried any of them, but Bart's Network Boot Disk claims to have this feature along with SSH and SCP which would be very useful as well.

A nifty tool I've just discovered is Bart's Boot CD. I'm using the CD that has multiple boot images on it. Boot with CD-ROM support, boot with network support, and an offline NT password recovery tool. The network support image will autodetect the network card and load the driver for it. Pretty neat.

I did a little hacking on it this week so that we could use it for drive imaging the computers in our labs at school.. Two key strokes and my brain dead co-workers are at the Drive Image screen. We have three different network cards in our computers, so that autodetect feature is really nice.

We only deal with network problems for students, and only then with software. We aren't allowed to open the computer to check things out, so I don't have to carry any screwdrivers or anything. I carry along a Knoppix CD and a CD filled with software.. School's Norton AV Corporate client, Adware & Spybot, latest IE setup files, lasest Mozilla & Netscape for Windows and Mac, a ton of NIC drivers, Win98 CAB files, Wink2k SP4 and XP SP1A, and some other random software. Also has some of Symantec's cleaners -- Klez, Nimda, etc.

One particular piece of software I carry is LSPfix. Basically, it'll fix what Net.net's spyware crap screws up. We had a quite a few problems with New.Net's crap last year, so this little program saved me some time quite a few times.

Link: ...all the tools you need on one Bootable CD-Rom... ...or from a network share... ...single point of maintenance... ...cleanboot and scan or clean ntfs volumes for virus... ...burn it from any workstation... ...and more...

Customize your own boot CD. I have MemTest86, PartitionMagic, Norton Ghost, etc.

It works great. No more 3.5" disks for each program.

Software using proprietary imagers can always be written on a box with FDD and read with dd or "rawwrite for windows" before being put onto a bootable CD (this sounds like a good candidate for a toolbox multi-boot CD, along with other such useful tools as BootIt NG).

Problem: I don't build new machines with floppy drives anymore.

Of the 4 programs I listed, 2 of them (SeaTools and PowerMax) use a proprietary disk creation program (Ontrack's Diskette Maker), so you're SOL for them.

The third program, Western Digital's DLG, comes (if you just download the diagnostics module) as just a .zip file containing the actual program (a single .exe). You should be able to add that to the CD portion of any standard DOS boot CD. (Disclaimer: I've used that guy's tools to make Win2K boot CDs, but haven't tried his DOS images.)

The fourth program is the easiest, however. IBM/Hitachi's DFT, comes in 2 flavors. The 'Windows' package uses an Install-shield based diskette maker program, so you could theoretically grab all the files from the temp directories it unpacks them too. Even easier, though, is to just download the 'Linux' package, which is an actual 1.44MB boot disk image, suitable for direct use with your favorite burning software (see: mkisofs -b, or Nero's "CD-ROM (Boot)" type.).

HTH.

I've got a bootable CD-R with MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, DESQView (don't ask me why), Windows 95 Original Retail, Win95b, the 2.5 OEM version of Win95, Win98, Win98 SE, and WinME.

I also tote along a copy of MS Office Professional 4.3, 95, 97, 2000, & XP. Just on separate CDs (talk about bloat!).

I've got NT 3.51 (I never could locate a copy of 3.1), 4.0, 2000, and XP. After reading this awesome site, I've been toying with making an all-inclusive NT boot disk, like my Windows boot disk above.

I also carry all the current service packs for Windows (name your version), NT, and Internet Explorer (v5.5 as well as v6 -- there are plenty of Win95 installs out there).

The boot disks are dependant on the type of network card and sound card.

If you use start with the one from Bart's you will be 90% complete. Add your specific network drivers from his selection and get your sound cards from your own drivers (sound in DOS is not hard but easier if can remember anything from the the old dos and Win3.11 days, YMMV depending on the card).

Barts boot disk already configures a ram drive (q: drive) but you can bump it up to 64MB by changing the xmsdsk line in the autoexec.bat to 65536 from 8192.

As for the mapping and copying the game files, make this bat file and store it on your floppy:

net use j: \\samba_server\some_share
mkdir q:\d3d
copy j:\d3d\*.* q:\d3d
q:
cd q:\d3d
attrib -r *.*
setup.exe

This method should work for any DOS game..

There are many different boot disks out there. Bart's method is advanced as far as DOS goes but can be confusing if you want to manually modify something. The boot disks I have made with it are used in production to boot our workstations for use with with Ghost and PQDI for imaging to and from our Samba servers and for booting into DOS to use various recovery tools and wiping of drives if needed. The ability to play old DOS games is a hidden extra when things are slow.

I used Bart's manual method and added from there. Bootdisk.com is a good source also.

Connect to a Samba share (or Win share) that has the D3D files. TCP/IP boot disk required for Samba but an IPX or Netbeui disk can be used for Windows. If using TCP/IP it helps to use DHCP.

Set up a 64MB ram drive.

Your sound card drivers for DOS.

Connect to the network share and download all the D3D files (about 54MB) to the ram drive.
Run setup.exe in the ram drive D3D directory and setup your sound and or network play and have fun.
When done, shut off the computer, remove the boot disk and all traces of the game are gone.

I have taken this a few steps further and made a bat file to copy the game files over and start the setup.exe automatically and converted the boot floppy to a boot cd.

There's several methods to do what you want. My personal favourite is EBCD. With a little changing here and there, it's become the most powerful boot CD I can possibly imagine! Every util for Windows and Linux (FAT16, 32, NTFS, etc.) is there... I'm not related to them whatsoever, but after getting their Pro version and manipulating it to my tastes (switching some programs to my own copies), I don't think I'll have to worry about boot disks for a long while.

Also, there's "Bart's Way" which is heavy on modules. Check out his website: http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

I'm hoping that creating a boot loader with lilo and choosing which floppy to boot off. Anyone got an experience of this and care to share thier thougts?

Check out Bart's way to create bootable CD-Roms, which includes instructions on using LILO to do just what you want.

I stand by my point that batch files suck.

Hey, I agree.. I was not trying to compare the two. I assume that when you are creating a script or something in DOS, you really have no choice but DOS, like boot disks. You can do some elaborate things but it IS very limited. DOS is not even on the same field compared to *nix command line.

I use Barts Boot Disk, supports most network card drivers, and has IP/IPX/Netbui (and ssh/scp.exe files), mouse with GUI worked fine.

I can boot any pc in the house, mount the /backup share on my linux box, and ghost any PC in the house to the server. I created a bootable cdrom with his floppy disk image, so I can just boot off cdrom with ghost on it, has configs already set.
Supports pcmcia cards too, works on my laptop. SSH had full vt102 supports, I was using VI and links.

Thou if I was going to just use SSH, I'd use a linux boot disk , for virtual consoles...

What about networking? Most MS-DOS networking was really butt-ugly.

I posted a comment about Barts network boot disk, thought I'd add some info, he currently supports most nic cards and tcp-ip and netbios, even ssh/scp. SSH supports all visual modes, so VI and screen works prefectly. Barts gives you an nice gfx gui to setup tcp/ip with a dhcp option, cant get much easier than that. It even saves your settings on the boot floppy in a config file.

Hey dont knock Barts boot disk. Its rather nice to have a boot floppy(or cdrom) that will boot almost any nic card. Top it off with Ghost i can backup/restore my laptop and workstations over IP. And dealing with partitions not whole HD's make it easier to move OS's around.

Hey, and SSH with barts disk works great, thou you miss multiple ttys.

Around here (College Station, Texas) blank CDRs cost less than floppy discs, per unit. Now admittedly you can only write them once, but I also like to keep around (read: not change) my obsd boot floppies for archival purposes. To install (or in my case recently, upgrade) my OpenBSD box, I downloaded the floppy image and the base installation (.tgz files) and burned them to a CD. Booted the box and finished the entire process in under 5 minutes, and now I've got a bootable disc for future use.

http://www.nu2.nu/ is a great reference for making more advanced bootable CDs, including having multiple floppy images on one CD and a menu to choose between them. Works great with my OpenBSD box. You can have all three of the i386 boot images on one CD, as well as a custom boot floopy and damn near anything else you could want. I used this process to build a CD combining 3 different Windows flavors onto one CD for easy installation (well, back when I had a job at least!). One CD could install Windows 2000, Windows 98 or Windows NT4, and was preferable to a network installation if we needed to do it during the day--we had very heavy network usage.

Its called Integrated Installaion. Here's the procedure:

1. You extract the service pack files using the "/x" parameter (Installing from a Network Drive)
2. Use update.exe with the "-s" flag (Using Command-Line Switches with Update.exe) to point to the full path of where you're about to burn the CD from:
update.exe -s:c:\path\to\cd\contents

Bart's way to create bootable CD-Roms has loads of information on making bootable CDs.

All the rave, those floppy disk linux distros. Over the past few years, I've learned to love tomsrtbt (Tom's RootBoot).

Then, last year, I found some Business Card CDRs, which hold 30-50mb and fit in your wallet.

Naturally, I wanted a super-utility boot disk. My ideal was high; mix tomsrtbt with a standard Win98 boot disk (essential for flashing) and a few other tools. Multiboot? Now there's a tough subject. Even with the best guide to making bootable cdroms I could find, it was hopelessly difficult.

When I saw this post on Slashdot, I knew I had to post this little story. In researching it, I actually found an answer to the question I wanted to pose to all of you; does anybody know of a linux distribution for these business card cdrs.

LNX-BBC is just that. Anybody tried it? Anybody know of another one? Anybody made a multi-boot linux/dos businesscard cdr? ...I want the iso!