Slashdot Mirror
Live Windows Bootable CDs for Sysadmins
WhoDaresWins writes "Ever wonder how to make a Knoppix-like live Windows bootable CD (or DVD)? Well its now possible using Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD. It's basically an expansion of the Microsoft's own Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment) idea which is a minimal Windows (XP/2K3) based bootable live CD with a command prompt and the ability to run some basic Windows GUI. Bart's PE allows anyone to make a bootable CD using their own Windows XP/2K3 media with Bart's PE Builder. What's more many people have contributed quite a few plugins that allow you to use the BartPE discs as quite a nifty system administration tool and with some work an almost usable quick system."
This has been available for over a year....
Ah, this stuff has been around for like 4 years, at least. We were using this kind of technology at the University of Chicago back in 1999 with WindowsNT images. (The department I worked in was responsible for supporting all of the public-use workstations throughout campus, and we naturally relied on disk imaging technologies.)
If you buy a product like Altiris LabExpert or Norton Ghost and are very clever, you can jury rig an entire operating system environment onto a CD.
Oddly enough, we stumbled on how to do this kind of thing while researching Wake-Over-LAN and PXE technologies. Apparently, the system BIOS just needs to be smart enough that it can look at something other than a PCI/IDE/SCSI hard drive for information with which to load a kernel into memory. If your BIOS is PXE enabled, it's smart enough to tell the system bus to look for a kernel on the network card (in the case of a Wake-On-LAN network boot) or on a CD drive (in the case of a CD boot).
FYI, PXE is Intel's Preboot Execution Environment specification, and is therefore working at the hardware level underneath Microsoft PE (Preinstallation Environment).
Nonetheless, the hardware capabilities which have allowed Windows to be booted from a CD have been around since 1999, at least, as they are part of Intel's PXE specification.
Just my two cents...
You are probably thinking of ERD commander from Winternals http://www.wininternals.com/products/repairandreco very/erdcommander2002.asp?pid=erd
Be careful about throwing stones. I remember using the Yggdrasil 'Plug and Play Linux' bootable CD back in 1993. It booted and ran rather nicely on a 486DX-33 with 16 megs of RAM.
The current Linux systems are bloatware pigs, just like Windows.
---
Among other things, the PE environment (or at least, the ones made with PE builder) are limited to 6 processes. They also reboot after 24 hours (intentionally, no less!), resolution is limited to 800x600, 16 bit color, etc. What this tool is really good for is scanning for viruses, doing repairs that otherwise would be difficult (or impossible) under your normal operating environment, etc. In fact, one thing I just saw PE builder used for was to flash a firmware on a machine that only had Linux on it.
Can anyone think of alot of uses for this that would beat out knoppix? Cause I can't.
Knoppix is Linux. Linux writing to NTFS is a VERY BAD IDEA. Windows tends to use NTFS now. Windows gets viruses which REALLY SCREWS UP THE SYSTEM. Windows needs to have viruses removed, but the installation cannot be trusted, or else there isn't a licenced copy to put on it.
Congratulations, BartsPE as a A/V plugin.
That's only one use, but its a damn common task for Microsoft Windows.
BartsPE > Knoppix for virus removal.
How about Offline NT Password & Registry Editor - saved my life more than once.
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
Yes it uses a RAM Drive as well the support built into Windows XP onwards for booting of readonly media as part of the components in Windows XP used in XP Embedded. XP Embedded basically just uses the same XP components but with different config (registry, ini file etc). See this -t ml/xetbswindowspreinstallationenvironment.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xpehelp/h
for more information about WinPE and its related XP Embedded technologies.
If all you want is read-only access, use NTFS. Explicitly deny write permission to the Everyone pseudo-group. Deny supersedes permit, as it should, and not even Administrators can bypass it automatically. They have to take ownership of the file and grant themselves the permissions they need. It's about as secure as mounting writeable hardware readonly (or nosuid or noexec) in Linux.
The Dell Server Assistant CD, a CD-ROM you get with any Dell server, is a booting CD that loads Windows NT and then runs a GUI program that lets you select a disk layout, an operating system, parameters for the operating system (system name, IP address etc) and then prepares an unattended installation file for that operating system. It asks for the OS installation CD, copies it to the disk, and hands over the installation process.
This CD uses some commercially available software kit, the name I now cannot recall, to load a Windows NT system into RAMdisk and let it run from there.
Unfortunately there is no apparent way to exit the installation GUI and go to the NT desktop.
This CD has existed for many years, and I sometimes wondered if we should make the effort to "hack" it and use it as a system repair tool for NTFS based systems.
I don't think this CD is anyway related to Microsoft WinPE technology, but I wonder why it does not stop and say "we must now reboot for the changes to take effect" all the time. It runs on a wide range of Dell servers and I don't think they are completely hardware compatible in the strict sense that Windows often requires.
As far as I am conserned... ERD Commander from Winternals has allways been my tool of choice.
You can boot up a stripped version of Windows. Unlock admin-accounts. Access local-net, make backups of documents on an otherwise f**ked up harddrive... And yes, there is a command prompt.
And no, I am not affiliated with Winternals, but ERD Commander has been around since NT4.0-days, if I remember correctly.
Maybe this is some kind of free tool, unlike ERD Commander, but it isn't news.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
OS 9 and older...
put any Mac installation CD in, restart while holding down the C key.
OS X
use Carbon Copy Cloner. This is just a GUI for the UNIX utilities built in. After making a clone CD, follow OS 9 instructions.
The problem with using this technique is that some Windows programs require write access in unexpected places. Admittedly this is becoming less of a problem, but there still are older programs around that store configuration data and/or temporary files under their C:\Progra~1\Progname subdirectory :-(
Worse, when they do and they cannot perform the write, the error information is often useless.
The program fails in an unclear way (like, nothing happens when you click something) or an error message like "cannot create file" (without filename) appears.
We run Windows 2000 Pro, and ordinary users of the system have no write access to anything on C: except their profile directory. This often results in lengthy debugging sessions and searches on the Internet to resolve problems. Even Office 2000 has problems running on such a system (the orgchart program does not work when C:\WinNT is not writable).
Similar problems arise when programs try to write to the registry.
There have been many times when I wished there was a tool like "strace" on these boxes so that it would be possible to quickly determine what the application tried to do, and why that failed.
(actually, an strace for Windows appears to exist. next time I have to debug something like this I will try it)
>Knoppix is Linux. Linux writing to NTFS is a VERY >BAD IDEA. Windows tends to use NTFS now.
...
Linux writing to NTFS partitions is safe by now. At least the kernel 2.6.1 menu config states:
"While we cannot guarantee that it will not damage any data, we have so far not received a single report where the driver would have damaged someones data so we assume it is perfectly safe to use.
Note: While write support is safe in this version (a rewrite from scratch of the NTFS support), it should be noted that the old NTFS write support, included in Linux 2.5.10 and before (since 1997), is not safe.
Ummm.. because Windows *DID* have this quite a few years ago?
Windows PE is just an extension of the XP embedded tool system, which is just an extension of the NT4 embedded tool system available since about 1998.
NT embedded has always been able to boot from a CDRom and run a complete system, MS just formalized this into something called "Windows PE" that Bart copied (actually, about 2 years ago).
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
As regards the complete system backup, well have you tried using the bultin Windows backup utility to do an Automated System Restore? From what I can gather it allows you to do a complete automated system restore from a backup by booting off the Windows CD and it actually writes partition layout and other information to a seperate floppy (or some other media) and the system part of the backup can be written out to a network/external disk or DVD etc. I haven't tried it but I have heard some people talk about it. I'm assuming they were able to use it to good effect. You might want to check it out. AFAIK that should do what you are looking for.
BTW just because that person was angry or he had an attitude problem doesn't mean that everything he said was wrong.
This is not "just a stripped down version". It DOES contain "utilities that can help with diagnostics". More, since you have to burn your own disk (the author can't redistribute the MS files needed) you can add other stuff than the default utilities.
http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/
(haven't used it myself but CT, the local german computer mag, says it's OK and they seldom miss a trick)
sofa -- so good