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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..."
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.
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...
...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.
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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.
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.
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