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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."
Read subject.
Like, 8 years ago?
This has been available for over a year....
You come for the NTFS support and stay for the win32 API. By far the other most useful things are the virus scanner and the networking support. You can easily detect all nics that XP will support outof the box or create a plugin if it doesn't
It's great for fixing Windows machines that won't boot. While I would prefer to use Knoppix and systemrescuecd BartsPE is usually more suited.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
"New hardware has been detected. Please reboot for the changes to take effect..."
"Windows is shutting down"
"Write configuration failed. The volume E: is read-only"
***
"Loading Windows"
"New hardware has been detected. Please reboot for the changes to take effect..."
5) It's Windows... is it legal?
6) It's Windows... does it have a virus that could spread?
7) It's Windows... so you already have it preinstalled on the network (94% of the times)
8) It's Windows... does the license allow you to use it on other machines?
9) It's Windows... can you use share it?
unfinished: (adj.)
To be honest, it feels more like a disappointment than a relief. I'm sure people can identify: we've all faced our horrible problems in the era of Windows 95 and 98 (and others). The operating system seems to completely crash and will only boot up to a screen that tells us some vital file is missing. Or perhaps we have that horrible old floppy disk with a few core programs on it, all of which are near useless. DOS is our only way to go... unless of course the floppy drive is broken. (Happened to me once... rendered the computer seemingly quite useless to me, with my level of knowledge at that time). Do you know what it's like remembering my MSN searches from 5 years ago, when I checked if a Windows bootable CD was a plausible thing? After all of those years, and all of those trials... suddenly, it's here. I happen to think that Windows XP is a fine operating system, and with Norton & Ad-Aware, most bad things are kept off my system anyway. Even the horrible "Your computer has started up in 640x480 with 16 colors, no sound card registered, no video card recognized, and no monitor apparently ever installed for NO APPARENT REASON WHATSOEVER" situation rarely comes up. And NOW we have bootable Windows? It's a silver lining with a cloud, if you ask me.
I'd like to announce the new Blue Screen of Death plugin. This plugin makes a blue screen of death a simple click away. Remove the unpredictability of not knowing exactly when your system will die!
Warning: Does not remove other blue screens of death.
http://pebuilder.meetup.com
Also don't forget the slashdot meet.
http://slashdot.meetup.com
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
Needless to say, this is good news for Microsoft as it may increase the acceptance of Windows as an alternative to Linux on the desktop ;-)
but then I get to thinking about hardware drivers and wonder how the heck they did it. One thing Linux has gotten pretty good at over the years is handling a billion zillion hardware drivers so that you know you've got the right ones for installing a system. I've never had good luck in Windows when upgrading the hardware if I leave the old driver in place.
You might be able to get away with a basic set of simple drivers (Basic IDE, sound blaster, NE2000...) but then you lose any sort of performance you might have once had... I'd like to know how this thing actually works.
I had just inherited a new notebook from a co-worker that had just left. I needed to make sure that all the corporate information on the notebook was accounted for. Unfortunately this was one they had built up themselves and noone had the admin passwords to the local machine. Enter ESCD.
Using this nice little CD I was able to boot to a linux environment, read the NTFS partitions and make changes to the password files with a nice little menu to step me through it.
A couple of quick changes later and I was able to log in to the machine as the local computer admin and receover all information that had been stored on there. Was quite funky.
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...
Are you sure? No, I haven't tried BartPE - and won't, since I am done with MS stuff forever now and my net pipe isn't wide enough to download an ISO.
But - two years ago I played around with the WinPE disk which was a REALLY cut down version XP. Sure it had a gui - win32 stuff was there allright since it could run cmd.exe in a window et all. Sure it has a GUI - if you mean that it doesn't have explorer, then just say that. Misinformation is bad. I could use many other alternative "window managers" (if you can call them that, they don't really manage windows - the win32 library shit does that.) WinPE wasn't very well put together - opening up notepad, I could go to "Desktop" and find weird non-existing entires, bah, whatever. It matters not anymore.
Sorry folks, the only way you will bait me back to the world of Windows is if someone makes a REAL POSIX layer running on top ntoskrnl (The NT Microkernel) (with an option to not load the win32 layer, obviously, whew)
I hate to go on a MS bash, but seriously - way to go MS. First you hire CMU and VMS guys, with whom you write an interesting kernel based on Mach and VMS. Then - you implement all your flaky win16-->32 stuff on top, make a half-assed "posix" layer, and OF COURSE never publicise the ACTUAL kernel (ntoskrnl) INTERFACE. (Thats the Nt... and Rtl... funcs if you care)
Imagine an ntoskrnl-based system with Hurd build around that and not around Mach. Or imagine a UNIX -like environment running on BSD-services running on top of ntoskrnl. Way to go MS - stifle creativity, advancement, technology.
...an almost usable quick system.
Almost usable...doesn't that describe all versions of Windows, stripped down or not?
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.
---
What about MS licensing? what are the limitations of distributing something like this? Knowing Microsoft It can't be free..... can it?
"Fear the penguin"
Linux with kernel panic...
MadPenguin.org
"i think if you read the eula, you can use my software on only one comptuer at a time. you can not install it on one computer and boot it into memory on another. i would like to introduce you to our team of lawyers. don't let their horns or fangs fool you. they are really nice. (ha ha ha ha). i might also remind you that there are specific ways in which you may use my software, all of which you agreed before you even opened the CD (thinks to himself: damn, i'm clever). if it isn't specified, and you don't have a license to do this, then you may not."
and this is another reason i use linux.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
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.
If Microsoft will ever release Kinoppix-like full-functional live CD version of Windows with a set of most frequently used apps, that will make many windows users' lives much easier. All viruses and worms that screw up your system by overwriting system configuration files/registry and by installing junk (e.g. spyware) on the hard disk will be history --as long as applications are allowed to run only from the CD-Rom. You can still keep custom icons and all junks (e.g. your mp3s and appz collection for file sharing) on hard disk, while everything in C:\Progra~1 and \Windows dirs will remain as they are supposed to be on a CD. Works just like XboX, I guess. Forget customization: security is more important than your custom wallpapers, don't you think?
Only and the biggest problem with Win-Live CD is that YOU CAN'T PATCH IT! and the fact is MS loves patching your PC. So after all, Win-Live is just another dream. How unfortunate.
Meanwhile, Windows live-CD will allow me to get rid of fat32 partition on my machine. no more dual-boot necessary....
"Bootable Windows"
As opposed to all those that won't boot?
Well, this IS something new!
Any word on when they plan to leak the source?
The Winternals product costs maybe $300. Bart's is free.
Also, it doesn't matter if Bart's is new. What matters is that more people need to hear about it.
I wish Bart's was better documented and easier to customize.
Note that Bart is doing for Microsoft customers what Microsoft should have done. Microsoft provides PE only for its biggest customers. Everyone else gets a crippled version of the OS.
Even if you have Bart's Windows XP is still crippled: "Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have crippled file systems." The file system cannot copy some of the files that are necessary to the operating system. Microsoft provides no way of making functional backups of its newer operating systems! (Yes, I know about Sysprep and NTBackup and third-party methods. Microsoft technical support agrees with my statement.)
I've skimmed the homepage with great interest. There is definitely the potential for an even greater tool than has already been created by this guy. But considering what folks are capable of doing, how are the guys at Redmond going to respond? With the recent code leak in the news, it could be very easy for Gates & Co to pull an SCO or something else in the spirit of control and intimidation to stop users from doing what they consider to be "unacceptable" use of the Windows EULA.
What's more many people have contributed quite a few plugins....
Bart addresses the bureaucratic legalities of using the original install media further down on his web page but when push comes to shove how solid is his position when his own code and that of his contributors are concerned?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
This man released something which involves making a copy of the copyrighted intellectual property from Microsoft! We must stop him, or Windows will be available on P2P networks very soon, and terrorists will use it to destroy the world!
(This 'copy is bad' nonsense works both ways, right?)
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
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.
First of all, lets understand you're talking about Windows in general and not WinXP eight years ago. Well, the answer is you could. I saw a number of write-ups on how to make a CD that would win Win95 right from the CD. Let me add that, because of the driver issues and such you did have to build it for the system you were configuring for (at least if you wanted to use anything other than the minimal VGA drivers) and you might have to ignore a few error message that it spit out while it booted, but it could be done. You wouldn't be able to make a CD you could carry anywhere, but some people were making CD"s that could boot like Knoppix for a classroom environment (without the obvious "cheat" of just installing from CD to hard drive and then running from hard drive). Finding the information is proving a bit tricky, but I should have it somewhere. When and if I find it, if someone doesn't beat me to it, I'll post what I have or a link to same.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Way to go MS - stifle creativity, advancement, technology.
I'm choosing to reply instead of moderate, because this is a *huge* pet peeve of mine. I've always thought NT-the-kernel was pretty elegant (especially compared to some *cough* Unix clones).
Actually, the actual Nt_ interfaces *are* documented, but (afaik) incompletely, and without source it's really of very limited utility.
In their quest for One True API (Win32 and now WinFX) they do seem to have killed off all innovation on top of one of their most technically impressive assets.
I had hoped the MSDN academic alliance and shared source licensing would encourage some work, but as long as MS adopts a more liberal download-from-website model for source licenses, innovation on top of the NT kernel is likely to remain a pipe-dream. (When the competition (Linux) is available nicely cross-referenced, you'd have to be crazy to fill out the paperwork for an NT source license.)
Go somewhere random
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.
Not everyone wants to give Winternals $300. Especially since the capability should be supplied with Windows XP, without having to pay more.
There has also been an article in german's well-known c't magazin that covers the process to create your very own live-windows-xp-cd. Just look at c't 02/04 p.180 and following.
Re 1:Who gives a fuck [about openness]
I could have agreed with you if we were talking different versions of "free" beer/libre. When using a closed product like MS Windows, you dont know from one day to another if the whole licensing process will change, whether they will extend support or just quit an entire product line etc. If they do quit, there is no way you can continue to patch your systems.
Re 3:drivers come on CDs these days
The grandparent poster did not say anything about floppys, and I totally agree with him. I have two PC systems, on with an Asus A7V and one with an ABit KT7 mainboard. NEITHER are usable without the latest versions of VIA 4in1-drivers. The built-in drivers that ships with Windows are old and outdated already at the time of shipment.
I wouldnt score your trolling much higher than grand-parent.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Lessee...
Only programmers care about that shit, and at least 99% of computer users are not programmers.
I've had managers who wouldn't touch closed-source apps because they didn't trust them and/or couldn't extend them. I've had non-developer colleagues who wouldn't touch closed-source apps because they cost money whilst open-source was a free-download away (and "why pay for something you'll only use once?", and "if it's closed source will people develop plug-ins for it?")
Ah, the joys of being able to choose your own hardward. I told my boss I wanted a beowulf-cluster of SPARC-stations. She laughed at me. Seriously, back in the real-world, some of us don't get any choice about the hardware we use. Seriosuly, back in the real-world most of us don't get any choice about the hardware we use. If open-source software can be stable on the same hardware as a closed-source BSOD-generator, which should I choose?
I run XP at home on the GF's laptop. I've got numerous driver install CDs. Strangely, I never received the one magic CD you hint at, the one with all the drivers for the hardware I've not bought yet. OK, XP comes with a lot of generic drivers, but every new piece of hardware I buy comes with a driver CD for Windows. Strangely, Linux typically "just works".
A. I assume you're joking. Firstly, MS didn't license (eg. with the GPL) their leaked source code, so no one legit will touch it lest they "contaminate" themselves or open themselves up to prosecution. Secondly, it's only a fraction of the complete source.
B.See statements regarding #1.
I've installed very few apps on XP that didn't edit the registry. Sure, I didn't do it by hand - the installer did it, and I pray that the uninstaller will also do it (I live in hope...) Fixinf Registry foul-ups after botched uninstallers run amok terrifies me because like many Windows users I don't feel comfortable editting the Registry. Firing up vim (or Emacs, I suppose...
Yup, a pretty weak troll attempt. Try harder.
This is where the serious fun begins.
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.
Bart had had his tool shut down by Microsoft before. In fact, he had to redo some work and submit it to Microsoft for them to okay it; I'm assuming that approval hasn't changed, assuming his continuing work is also very much original.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
Hey, this could be a great tool for converting Linux users to WinXP!! Now they can try Windows without installing it and when they start to like it, they can switch to a WinXP installed on the harddrive.
This Live-Windows-CD is also great, if you need to use Windows but all your friends have Linux and in your office there is only Linux etcetc... Don't worry, now you can keep this CD in your pocket, and use Windows on any computer!
Oh wait... did I just get something backwards?
If it's good, maybe it'll take some market share from BSD.
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
Is it just me or haven't you been able to boot from the Mac OS CDs for years? I even remember Norton Utilities for Mac booting into its own Mac OS that ran from the CD. I'm actually surprised that Windows hasn't implemented this feature, because back in my Mac days, it saved me from having to format my hard disk quite a few number of times.
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla