Windows XP In Your Pocket

BoredStiff writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the Bart PE Builder software utility takes Windows XP and shrinks the OS to your USB flash drive. Besides converting your mini-drive into an emergency boot disk, you can use the utility to load a Web browser, media burning software and more - to have handy anywhere you go. And by the way, it doesn't violate the Windows XP EULA." From the article: "If your PC has a relatively new motherboard, its BIOS will already include the functions necessary to support USB-attached boot media. If so, you need only make the right selections in that BIOS menu to boot from a USB flash drive. Older PCs, on the other hand, won't accept USB drives as valid boot devices. This means a BIOS update that supports USB boot options is necessary. You can find information about where to obtain such updates from your PC's (or motherboard's) user manual, on the driver CD included with the PC (or motherboard) or on the vendor's Website."

Comments

LiveCD Windows

[geomon]

I've been running BartPE on machines at work and it is the best. We tried similar commercial products based on Windows PE and have found this open source tool to be the most flexible way to get a bootable Windows image customized to our corporate profile.

But Bart's is not the officially sanctioned Windows PE: In the Technet Webcast about Windows PE a Microsoft Program Manager (not calling any names) says: "BartPE is an unlicensed version of WinPE and of Windows XP. Something to we really encourage people to stay away from because it is actually an improperly licensed version of Windows".

"The Man" doesn't like BartPE; all the more reason to use it.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[putko]

So what sort of violation are you looking at?

DMCA violation? Copyright violation? Breaking your shrinkwrap?

It would seem that given the illegality of this, you'd might was well not do it, and use a different OS, like NetBSD, FreeBSD or some Linux-based OS.

The last thing I need is the BSA (Business Software Alliance) coming to my place of business with a bunch of pigs and poring over my crap to find violations and then hit me for $20K per violation.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[jdigriz]

According to Bart PE's own web page, that Program Manager is in error.
  It says "Q. "BartPE is an unlicensed version of WinPE and of Windows XP."
A. This is not correct, BartPE is not WinPE and will never be WinPE. BartPE builds from Windows XP or Server 2003 files. BartPE is not built from any WinPE file and does not use any files that belong to Windows PE!
Note: Previous versions of PE Builder did instruct the enduser to download certain WinPE network components from the internet when enabling the network support, but v3.0.30 and higher have built-in network support."

From: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ under the Legal Information section.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[geomon]

So what sort of violation are you looking at? DMCA violation? Copyright violation? Breaking your shrinkwrap?

None, no, no, and ummmm...., no.

It would seem that given the illegality of this,

Why? The OS is Microsoft's. The builder is Bart's. He just bypassed the WinPE, not the OS. You still have to create the LiveCD with Microsoft products and follow the EULA for their OS. The same is true for WinPE products developed commercially and with the blessing of the Borg. ...you'd might was well not do it, and use a different OS, like NetBSD, FreeBSD or some Linux-based OS.

Why? If my customers are using Windows, and I am trying to correct a problem in Windows, so that my customer can continue using... Windows, why would I use some *other* OS? If they were using Linux, I would use Knoppix to fix their system.

The last thing I need is the BSA (Business Software Alliance) coming to my place of business with a bunch of pigs and poring over my crap to find violations and then hit me for $20K per violation.

Then don't use pirated software. BartsPE is his own work, free from Microsoft's code. He just came up with a method for creating a LiveCD that is different from other companies who use Microsoft's PE software.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Master of Transhuman]

Uhm, it is my understanding that Bart pulled the original PE version he had used and built one from scratch. He discusses this very issue on his site.

As for the files used by it, they come from your properly licensed Windows XP copy.

Unless Microsoft is saying their fucking EULA does not permit you to move files from a hard disk to a CD, I think said Microsoft spokesmen is yet another FUCKING LIAR from Microsoft.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Master of Transhuman]

Yes, this is exactly why I accuse said Microsoft employee (who now claims to be a FORMER employee - woop-de-do - NOW he tells the truth?), who posts a few posts above, of being a FUCKING LIAR.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Search P2P for "khauyeung" and you will find a fair number of interesting PE-ish CD images.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Izago909]

When using BartPE you should know that:

1. It is legal to make a "backup copy" of ANY files from your original Windows XP/2003 media to another media.
2. It is legal to add any other files you wish to the backup media.
3. It is not legal to use a BartPE CD and an installed Windows XP/2003 both at the same time under the same Windows XP/2003 EULA.
4. It is not legal to change any binary files in the process according to the Windows XP/2003 EULA. This makes "winlogon" and "bootscreen" hacks illegal.
5. A BartPE image is (and I quote) "not a properly licensed WinPE". This means that if you want to have a licensed WinPE, you cannot use BartPE. However, you can use a BartPE image under the license of the Windows XP/2003 EULA that came with the BartPE XP/2003 source media.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[CptSkippy]

Why? If my customers are using Windows, and I am trying to correct a problem in Windows, so that my customer can continue using... Windows, why would I use some *other* OS?

I would use the best tool for the job, which isn't always an OS of the same flavor as the one you're trying to repair.

Case in point, something happened to my XP system that caused the dreaded "Page Fault in Non Paged Area" BSOD every time I booted my system. Microsoft said it was bad memory and after swapping everything in my system out to no avail I popped the HDD in another PC to get the files off it and guess what happened when I booted it. Yep, BSOD. Odd when every HDD analysis tool said the drive was fine. Given that it is a SATA drive I booted the other PC without the HDD connected and then hot plugged it. After about 10 seconds of installing new hardware the PC gave me that ever so lovely BSOD message "Page Fault in Non Paged Area". Hrmm... threw it back in the old PC and booted off the XP install media and guess what the XP setup program did? If you guessed BSOD, you're correct. I didn't even know you could BSOD the setup program, it looks like a DOS app with it's lovely ASCIIness.

So what's a guy to do if he can't use any Microsoft product to repair his system? Well I booted off a Knoppix disk and mounted the HDD without problem, then I copied my files over the network to another PC. Being that I know nothing about Linux and the partitioning program I found in Knoppix gave me no help and a couple errors, I booted off a Fedora Core disc I had laying around and used it's partitioning utility to zap the disk. Then I booted off the XP disc and it let me reinstall the system.

Without a non Microsoft OS, I would have never been able to reformat my HDD or recover any of the files.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Good example.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[richy freeway]

Do you have a certain amount of swear words you have to use up before the day ends?

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Sancho]

Actually, he might just be mistaken.

It's entirely possible, nay likely, that neither he nor anyone in his group checked BartPE for violations. You can be sure that Microsoft's lawyers have done their research into it, but this man himself probably did not. As such, he may assume that it's using components illegally.

It's incredibly irresponsible to go spouting claims when you don't know if they're accurate, but it does not make him a liar--only inaccurate.

Of course, if he /does/ know the truth, and if the truth is that BartPE violates no EULA nor is unlicensed in any way, then yes, he's a liar. Now we have to question whether he's fucking. I don't really want to go there.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[laptop006]

That's pretty unlikely. As the BartPE site says, to use it legally you must hold a spare XP/2003 licence for the CD. And as it's able to generate the CD using only what's in BartPE (1 exe and a few text files) and the windows CD where could the infringing files come from?

Re:LiveCD Windows

[zcat_NZ]

And as it's able to generate the CD using only what's in BartPE (1 exe and a few text files) and the windows CD where could the infringing files come from?

"from violating the EULA"

Microsoft's EULA says you're allowed to install Windows XP on a single computer. Installing Windows XP onto a CD or bootable USB device is not the same as installing it on a single computer, and is in violation of the precise wording of the EULA.

Doing the above specifically for the purpose of easily moving it from one computer to another is a pretty clear violation of the intent of the EULA.

As for Bart, there's some crap in the EULA about reverse-engineering that I think he might have infringed a bit.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Sancho]

You're welcome to think that. As it is, older versions of BarPE /did/ require files from WinPE in order to get some functionality. Furthermore, it would be really, really easy to assume that BartPE is a hacked/modified version of WinPE and would, thus, be unlicensed. Particularly if you didn't read much or any of the site itself and were only shown a demo of the unit ir something. It's reasonable to assume that this guy didn't know what he was talking about. Don't assume he's a liar just because he's connected to Microsoft.

Oh, and violating the terms of your license revokes your license. BartPE itself may not be an "unlicenced" copy of Windows, but if performing the operations on it violates the EULA, then the manager was closer to truth in his statement than you might think.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[bhtooefr]

Similar example:

One day, my (Dell) laptop running Win2K decided to barf, so that it would freeze part way through bootup. Nothing, and I mean, NOTHING, not even safe mode, would bring it back. So, I said, "oh, well, at least I've got a working SuSE install on here, and I can get the files off, because it mounts the Windows partition as NTFS..."

So, I get the files off, and use it for a while.

Then, I need Windows again. So, I throw in a Windows XP CD (the one licensed for the laptop), and it freezes if I try to start setup. And, the recovery console was worthless.

So, I try a 2000 (Server, but this was just for testing) CD. Same damn thing.

Finally, I grab a LiveCD I had lying around, and use it to nuke the partitions, and XP installs no problem.

If it weren't for that, I'd have had to find an old 98 CD, boot THAT, and nuke the partitions - if DOS FDISK would even work for that.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[mikiN]

Installing Windows XP onto a CD or bootable USB device is not the same as installing it on a single computer, and is in violation of the precise wording of the EULA.

Since when is installing an OS onto a CD and then booting off it different than installing it on a hard drive? Hell, if I managed to install Windows on a bootable lawn mower, what difference does it make?

Doing the above specifically for the purpose of easily moving it from one computer to another is a pretty clear violation of the intent of the EULA.

Please show me exactly where anyone (the editor of TFA or Bart himself) suggests using BartPE in this way. I for one can't find it.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[billcopc]

If the BSA comes to your place of business with a bunch of pigs, politely order the BSA to get the hell off the premises. They have no legal jurisdiction, they are merely a bunch of for-hire office terrorists.

Software companies pay the BSA to work their scare tactics and offload the bad press. If Microsoft employees knocked on your door and strip-searched you, you'd get them locked up and their faces painted all over the news. Microsoft would lose mucho credibility. If the BSA does it, we don't give a hoot, they are a "bad" company from the get-go. Their "fines" are meaningless. The only organisation who can sue you for software theft is the IP holder, and even then it's a court matter.

As for the pigs, well, be nice; give them donuts and a pat on the head.

Rant aside, BartPE is 99.44% legal as it does almost the same thing as Windows' PE builder toolkit, which is only available to OEM's. Microsoft has no "PE" product for end users so they have no foot to stand on, should they decide to litigate. The best they can hope for is a crooked judge and expensive lawyers over something that's worth near-nothing.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Master of Transhuman]

"It's reasonable to assume that this guy didn't know what he was talking about. Don't assume he's a liar just because he's connected to Microsoft."

What's wrong with this picture?

He's a Microsoft shill. He doesn't know what he's talking about, but he made direct and unambiguous comments about it. That makes him a liar in my book.

As for violating the EULA terms, nobody gives a rat's ass whether Bart's PE is "reverse-engineering" (it probably is, at least as far as the build process goes - is that necessarily covered by the EULA? Take it to court and find out). Secondly, even if you are enabling Windows XP to run on a second machine, you are only running a small PORTION of XP, not the whole thing. You are therefore not using it to violate the purpose of the license, which is to prevent people from using XP on more than one machine.

And that latter is itself onerous, since it was my understanding that you could install a single copy of Windows on both a desktop and a laptop that you personally own (not that most people would need to, since they would get both machines with it already installed.)

Read this from http://www.networkworld.com/net.worker/columnists/ 2004/0920gaskin.html:

In Section 1.5 of the Windows XP EULA it states: 1.5 Storage/Network Use. You may also store OR INSTALL [My emphasis] a copy of the software on a storage device, such as a network server, used only to install OR RUN [My emphasis] the software on your other workstation computer. The logic here for the customer is that "I'm only storing a copy of the operating system on the back-up device, and only for the purpose of reinstalling the operating system in case of failure."

Pray tell, what is the difference between that and running Bart's PE?

And especially for tech support people like me, who would otherwise have to carry around a separate copy of Windows XP - which would be useless because it could not be installed on the client machine anyway without destroying the existing installation.

This column specifically states - and from official Microsoft sources, apparently - that it is a violation of the EULA to make an image backup of Windows XP!

If that is the case, yet another reason to tell Gates to stick Windows up his ass.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[zcat_NZ]

Please show me exactly where anyone (the editor of TFA or Bart himself) suggests using BartPE in this way. I for one can't find it.

Is there any other situation where you would want Windows installed on a USB stick or CDR? What practical uses does this have except for being able to move your install from one machine to another?

I don't think there's anything particularly -wrong- with BartPE, I just don't trust Microsoft to be fair and reasonable about it. If you were using BartPE as one of your tech-support system recovery tools and Microsoft decided to audit your business, I have no doubt at all that they would count this as a licence violation.

Re:LiveCD Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had a BartPE disc, you could have repaired your native OS.
The crucial thing is to build your BartPE disc with an imaging program plugin (Image for Windows, Drive snapshot, Ghost 8.0) and get a snapshot of a known good image. Then just rebuild from the CD or UFD. (You can archive the KGI on an another partition, an external HDD, or CD/DVD).
But there are hundreds of plugins that can troubleshot just about any problem that occurs on the HDD. You can run antiviral apps, anti adware apps, partitioning programs, bin hex editors, CD burning utilities, MBR utilities, registry editors, etc.
Knoppix is great stuff, but doesn't handle NTFS very well.

Cool, but why?

[SpaceLifeForm]

You can certainly get more tools on the same storage space with GNU/Linux than XP.

Re:Cool, but why?

[CDMA_Demo]

But you won't get Xtra Problems that way!!!

Re:Cool, but why?

[ranolen]

Simple answer. More people know how to use windows then linux. User friendly is the key...

Re:Cool, but why?

[kryten_nl]

Editing the windows registry?

Re:Cool, but why?

[parasonic]

Mod him up to +5, troll. Then make me +5, offtopic.

Re:Cool, but why?

[NanoGator]

"You can certainly get more tools on the same storage space with GNU/Linux than XP."

OSS is all about choice until one of those choices is provided by Microsoft. I love Slashdot.

Re:Cool, but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mounting and writing to NTFS volumes. That's what I've used BartPE for in the past. Saved my bacon.

Re:Cool, but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Open Source is about, uh, being open.

Free software is about being Free.

Where do you get "all about choice"?

Yeah, I guess some people "choose" Microsoft, but that's their problem.

Re:Cool, but why?

[JPyun]

OSS might be about choice, but some choices are glaringly obvious.

Re:Cool, but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Where do you get "all about choice"?

No freedom == no choice.

Whatever. Trying to win by being too literal is weak.

Re:Cool, but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a close minded zealot sure does make the decision making process simpler. "I hate Microsoft so it's okay to close my mind to any benefits there would be to running their products."

Spare us the lame rationalizations for your hypocracy.

Re:Cool, but why?

[Adam9]

Yeah, I guess some people "choose" Microsoft, but that's their problem.

Or for some of us, their problem is our income ;)

Re:Cool, but why?

[JudicatorX]

Because, of course, a post that happens to compare Linux to Windows has to be anti-microsoft, instead of being true.

Right now I'm typing this on a laptop that dual-boots XP and linux. The raw XP install takes up a gig. And what utilities does that give you? notepad, and...um... regedit.... and scandisk.

a barebones install of ubuntu consumes less than 100 megs of space, and lets you put a whole lot more utilities in the rest of that 900 megs.

Re:Cool, but why?

[Master of Transhuman]

The issue is direct support for the NTFS file system.

Other than the Captive utility, Linux can not do read-write reliably on NTFS. Supposedly, even with the Captive utility, the files do not work right with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (I haven't verified this, I read this somewhere.)

The Captive utility is a great idea, but it basically just puts a wrapper around the Windows NTFS file system driver. So it's not that different in concept from Bart's PE. But having native NTFS support is very useful. You can then do things like run Windows specific AV and spyware cleaners that can access the NTFS file system.

Re:Cool, but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Because, of course, a post that happens to compare Linux to Windows has to be anti-microsoft, instead of being true."

Funny, while complaining about a misconstrued point, you're misconstruing a point.

Re:Cool, but why?

[The Original Yama]

Since when was Windows OSS?

Re:Cool, but why?

[The Original Yama]

I don't know about WinXP SP2, but from my experience Captive works fine with Win2K3 SP1.

Re:Cool, but why?

[bhtooefr]

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor?

Runs under Linux - heck, they've got a Linux live-floppy with it on there...

Re:Cool, but why?

[Master of Transhuman]

Yes, apparently there are issues with SP2 only. No surprise there. Supposedly Captive is no longer under active development since it works well enough for pre-SP2 machines.

I just found a post from Jan saying the following:

"Anyway Captive NTFS itself is already dead as Linux-NTFS may have finally got the read/write support (not tested myself) and people generally do not differentiate products as long as they work in 99% of cases, either in Linux-NTFS or Captive case. Both projects have that 1% due to different
reasons. I still think Captive would be useful as generic MS-Windows drivers compatibility layer but there is currently no target market for it."

He appears to be wrong about full read/write support according to the official NTFS site. They still say, relative to the new FUSE ntfsmount system, that its functionality for writing is dependent on the NTFS kernel mods and they are STILL read-only. I may have interpreted this wrong - it doesn't seem like anybody involved can give a straight answer to the simple question "Can you read and write files to the NTFS volume from user space programs and utilities?" - but it doesn't look good.

An article here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6261 talks about the SP2 problem and gives workarounds.

From that article it seems the issues really aren't about SP2 "breaking" Captive - it's more that it just breaks Captive's ability to find the driver files. The read/write aspect still works once you have the XP files which the workarounds solve.

Also from some of the posts I've just seen in various pages via my Google search, I'd say Captive is not a "fire up and forget" approach to reading NTFS from Linux - sometimes it just doesn't work, apparently.

The NTFS for Linux utility that costs $70 from Paragon Software is beginning to look like the only way to go, since the NTFS project has only three people working on it in their spare time and they have absolutely no idea when write support will be included. They promise to do it, but it could be another five years...

Re:Cool, but why?

[NanoGator]

I just love some of the things people do when they face a criticism they don't wanna hear. Not a single person has addressed my point.

Funny you should mention that...

[martinultima]

...because Damn Small and Puppy can both do that, too. And as far as I know, it doesn't violate any license agreements either.

So, fellow Slashdotters...

[Tackhead]

> Windows XP In Your Pocket

So, fellow [male] Slashdotters, is that Windows XP in our pockets, or do we all just have a case of blue balls?

Re:So, fellow Slashdotters...

[graveyardduckx]

It's not Microsoft... it's IBM, and it's known to millions as Big Blue.

Re:So, fellow Slashdotters...

[shigelojoe]

or do we all just have a case of blue balls?

With Windows involved, wouldn't it be the Blue Balls of Death (BBOD)?

Re:So, fellow Slashdotters...

[superpulpsicle]

LOL you just gave all those IBM commericals new meaning.

Re:So, fellow Slashdotters...

[grondu]

...it's IBM, and it's known to millions as Big Blue.

Since we're talking about blue balls, shouldn't that be Bag Blue?

Re:So, fellow Slashdotters...

[Mercano]

I thought Bill was just happy to see me.

And to update your BIOS

[moonbender]

This means a BIOS update that supports USB boot options is necessary. You can find information about where to obtain such updates from your PC's (or motherboard's) user manual, on the driver CD included with the PC (or motherboard) or on the vendor's Website.

And to flash your updated BIOS, just boot the system to DOS using your USB boot drive! See how useful those things are!

Re:And to update your BIOS

[jschoenberg]

Maybe you are not familiar with PE, but it's a 32-bit OS, with full device driver compatibility (uses XP drivers) that also will execute shell scripts (VBS, and various other laguages supported). It's really the next generation DOS (in your context of DOS), and there will be a new version shipped with Windows Vista.

Re:And to update your BIOS

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could boot to DOS with a flash-drive, you don't need to flash your BIOS.

Re:And to update your BIOS

[moonbender]

Oh, that's true - heck, somebody ought to make a joke about that!

mirror and comment

[winkydink]

All pages mirrored here.

Why not just boot one of the gazillion linux distros and fix it that way? You'll get a ton more tools for your capacity as well.

Re:mirror and comment

[Anonymous Coward]

What about mirror dot? Hasn't that already mirrored it?

Re:mirror and comment

[winkydink]

See how many pages mirrordot has mirrored. Then check networkmirror. 'nuff said.

Re:mirror and comment

[Synli]

> See how many pages mirrordot has mirrored. Then check networkmirror. 'nuff said

These sites are scrapers not mirrors. Just see how many google ads are attached to the stolen content...

Re:mirror and comment

[winkydink]

semantics

Re:mirror and comment

[Sancho]

Although you could clean viruses this way (if you have Captive-NTFS, of course) you'll likely have a harder time uninstalling spyware, fixing registry entries, etc. Even cleaning viruses will be faster in PE because of the native drivers, as Captive's emulation is still just that--emulation. It's slow as heck.

It's just a case of "right tool for the job." Linux is great at recovering files, dumping filesystems, etc. when trying to repair Windows. Windows itself is better at most of the rest of the necessary operations.

I dunno. What else can you do in Linux that you can't do in WindowsPE relating to repairing a Windows installation?

or perhaps

[834r9394557r011]

you could run qemu or knoppix and have a secure os for that kind of stuff.

Re:or perhaps

[tbonius]

the WindowsPE/Bart PE concept is actually pretty handy for setup and deployment of Windows based systems, as well as a great recovery tool for Windows.

Some might reply "try !insert favorite Linux distribution here!", but as stated earlier, when you need a tool for Windows, this actually works pretty well.

Another concept we have implemented here at my place of employment, is to create a small PE partition at the beginning of the drive.. and then install the actual production OS on the secondary partition. When any issues arise, we can remotely reboot to the first partition and run one of many different build/recovery options.

It is interesting that an older tool such as PE is just now making news in some places.

Re:or perhaps

[ari_j]

Only if you don't want the ability to write to an NTFS filesystem. I had the same thought - Why would you want a Windows XP LiveCD? And that's the answer I came up with - to make changes to my NTFS filesystem.

Re:or perhaps

[LurkerXXX]

And just in case someone comes back with "Knoppix can write to NTFS if you use the NTFS driver from windows", I've used a LOT of versions of Knoppix and I've NEVER gotten that to work correctly.

Re:or perhaps

[Council]

And just in case someone comes back with "Knoppix can write to NTFS if you use the NTFS driver from windows", I've used a LOT of versions of Knoppix and I've NEVER gotten that to work correctly.

Me neither.

In fact, the documentation was unchanged from 3.3 to 3.7 but in 3.7 the options they referred to were GONE. They said to click on a particular setting that was absent, they referred to nonexistent files, etc. Hopefully this was fixed in 3.8 but I don't have high hopes.

Re:or perhaps

[sconeu]

The 3.6 CD in "Knoppix Hacks" works fairly well.

Re:or perhaps

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Ummm... writing to NTFS under linux has been (unofficially) stable for some time now, even the older versions (=2.4). The newer (2.6) version works fine, albeit in a slightly round-about manner in some cases (there are certain file operations it cannot do straight up)

Re:or perhaps

[ari_j]

The last time I tried, you could only write to NTFS in the sense that you could change the contents of a file - you could not change the size of a file, delete a file, or create a new file, if I remember at all correctly.

Re:or perhaps

[jayloden]

oh, I see. How do you clean spyware and viruses with knoppix on an infected windows machine that's formatted with ntfs?

hmmm...maybe that's why you might still have a use for a bootable CD that will run windows tools and get full read/write ntfs support.

I'm a linux fan as much as the next guy, and I'd rather never have Windows on any computer I own or care for than have to build one of these CDs to fix them, but at the same time, I can see there's things it can do that you just can't do with a Linux live CD right now.

Re:or perhaps

[Sancho]

Seems like with ClamAV and Captive-NTFS, you could do the same thing.

Re:or perhaps

[jayloden]

captive-ntfs isn't as safe and stable as doing it through a PE disk. It runs fine for some people some of the time, but when I tried it, it corrupted the ntfs file system all over the place and it took like three or four hours worth of running chkdsk on it until Windows was able to boot back up normally.

I'm not saying it's going to do that every time, but it's not worth the risk, or the complications involved in running Ad-Aware and Spybot under Wine, etc etc. On top of that, ClamAV isn't going to detect the same things as AntiVir, AVG, Norton, or McAfee, and so on.

There are many things Linux is awesome at, which is why I run it on every computer I own, but I really don't think this is one of them (yet).

Re:or perhaps

[Sancho]

I definitely agree with your comments on ClamAV. I do think it's a useful utility, though. I'd definitely prefer to run native Windows utilties because they'll be better tested and probably updated more frequently.

I'm surprised with your captive-ntfs experiences. I've used it a fair amount and never seen any data or filesystem corruption except once, when the disk itself was going bad.

Bart PE works great

[Nerd Systems]

I've used Bart PE many times in my PC business, http://www.nerdsystems.com/ and it has saved the day so many times. I routinely fix computers for people that have registry errors, video issues, and more, that have me locked out of the system, not even able to get into things using safe mode...

I'm currently running Bart PE off a CD, where I just pop the CD in, boot off it, and a few minutes later I have full access to the machine, and can repair anything that I need to get done...

This USB method will work even better, can just load Bart PE onto my USB drive, load all the applications that I use often, such as Anti-Spyware and more, and go from there....

I wonder if USB drives being so fast, and being read/write, if one day I could just run the entire OS off this USB drive, and pretty much have my complete system working wherever I go....

Bart PE is great... going to try out the USB method right now as we speak...

Re:Bart PE works great

[big_groo]

Nice plug. Your web page jumps my CPU up to 20%. Good job.

Do you design web pages too? Lots of flash please.

Re:Bart PE works great

[nickheart]

hmmm.....usb 2.0 = 480Mbps...... EIDE = 133Mbps..... maybe we should just start hooking up all our hard drives via USB........

Re:Bart PE works great

[sconeu]

Unit conflict

USB 2.0 = 480Mbps = 60MBps
PATA EIDE = 133MBps

I have no idea what SATA data rates are, but they're bits per second rather than bytes.

Re:Bart PE works great

[BrianRaker]

SATA is rated at up to 150MBytes/s. SATA-II is supposed to be good up to 300MBytes/s.

Not bits.

Re:Bart PE works great

[nickheart]

my source ... google search, said Mbps.... i'm sorry......

Re:Bart PE works great

[kevcol]

Time to dump that 486.

Re:Bart PE works great

[Nik13]

You only wish that flash memory in that USB2 memory sticks were anywhere NEAR that speed. USB memory sticks are quite slow really.

Re:Bart PE works great

[slapout]

I wonder if USB drives being so fast, and being read/write, if one day I could just run the entire OS off this USB drive, and pretty much have my complete system working wherever I go....

You can do this already with some linux distros like DSL or Puppy.

(Course, you probably couldn't do this with windows because of the required activation.)

Re:Bart PE works great

[bladx]

haha

Re:Bart PE works great

[DrSkwid]

Flash memory has limited writes. These will get used up pretty quickly if you have much logging a la syslog going on.

Re:Bart PE works great

[Jackmn]

Ergh. Lose the menus, or add an option for plain HTML.

Re:Bart PE works great

[Jackmn]

flash menus*

Abount Licensing

[rolfwind]

Asking as a business consultant - Would you be able legally put this on a usb stick w/o another license just like you can make a back_up cassette of your CD's under the fair_use clause or would you need another license?

This would be used as a recovery stick.

Re:Abount Licensing

[Punboy]

I assume this would be fine... i often run two or three installs of Windows on the same machine for testing purposes, all under one license. AFAIK, licenses limit the number of machines you can install on, not the number of installations you can have. So long as you only use it on one machine, or as long as that machine has an already licenses version of Windows XP on it, you should be fine.

But, IANAL.

Re:Abount Licensing

[rolfwind]

Yeah, I was thinking along the same line but wanted confirmation - even though the summary says it's okay (I have take time to read the article past the first page - it's pretty long) I learned not to trust the typical /. summaries.

Is this news, or a dupe?

[eander315]

This was covered long ago. I fail to see how it becomes newsworthy because the goons at Tom's just discovered it. Putting it on a USB flashdrive rather than a CD doesn't really cut it either, though from RTFA, I gather that's what has gotten them breathing heavy.

Re:Is this news, or a dupe?

[xander2032]

I don't think it's news. Big deal... They put it on a USB flash drive.

Is it just me, or has Tom's Hardware been "dumbed down" since they got that new editor guy? I haven't been able to find a decent article on the site since! And I used to read it like daily!

Is that an OS in your pocket.....

[Anonymous Coward]

nope!

EULA

[kdark1701]

"And by the way, it doesn't violate the Windows XP EULA."

Like anyone here honestly cares about that silly text file.

Re:EULA

[ch-chuck]

If you don't read the EULA and agree to the TOS, they can't give you a COA and lower your TCO, then you'll be SOL.

Re:EULA

[NanoGator]

" then you'll be SOL."

Argh! That'd suck if they forced me to watch cheesy movies!

Re:EULA

[eosp]

It legally does not apply in reality. On the box it says "by using the software inside, you agree to the EULA. If you don't want to, take it back and return it." But few if any stores do software returns. And as a sidenote, old ones said "by opening this package, you agree to all the terms inside that you haven't seen yet."

Re:EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

COA? Coat of Arms? Certificate of Appreciation?

Rejoice!

[gunpowda]

Excellent: this will come in really useful on a key-ring for those urgent recovery moments when your Windows installation is...

Oh, wait.

A7N8X Drivers?

[r2tincan]

I formatted about a month ago and I was looking for a BIOS update to my Asus A7N8X that would allow for USB device boot, but I couldn't find one. Anyone know where I can find one or a pirate bios that supports it?

Re:A7N8X Drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Asus have never traditionally supported USB booting. My last 5 or so motherboards (I tend to upgrade every 12 months) have all been ASUS and none have supported USB booting. I currently own an A7N8X Deluxe v1.04. Because of this I had planned for my next motherboard to probably be Gigabyte or some other mobo that supports USB booting - I'm dead serious I want this feature!

Re:A7N8X Drivers?

[Snover]

I have an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe which supports booting from USB. I have another Asus K8N-E Deluxe that also supports booting from USB. You may need to have a USB device connected *first*, and then go into the BIOS and change the boot order, but the option should be there.

Get out of my head!!!!

[AnotherEscobar]

Where is my tinfoil hat? I was just downloading something for this this morning to repair an XP home machine from a lost password. Cool timing

Re:Get out of my head!!!!

[nicnac__001]

Just boot to safe mode... XP home doesn't require a password in this mode :) (or so i've heard, as I've never used XPhome)

Re:Get out of my head!!!!

[CyanDisaster]

XP will require a password, provided that one was already set up on the account you're trying to get in to. By default though, I believe the administrator account in XP Home has no password, and you aren't given the option to set a password during the install.

Hope be with ye,
Cyan

And the crazy thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

The crazy thing is that a "full" install of WinXP (which BartPE is not) can NOT boot from USB. If you don't believe me, try it.

Unbelievable...

Windows bloat...

[Pig Hogger]

Are you happy to see me, or is that a Windows USB key in your pocket??

Someone make a bootable image

[hattig]

Which boots into several virtualised operating systems - one Linux, one FreeBSD, one Mac OS X, and one of these shrunken Windows XPs...

Do your graphics work in Mac OS X, copy it across to the Windows machine to do whatever Windows does well, then upload it to the web server test platform on the Linux partition, which accesses the database you've set up on the FreeBSD part. hehe

Re:Someone make a bootable image

[Tony Hoyle]

OSX might be a little difficult...

I've seen boot CDs that boot into different versions of DOS/FreeDOS and also Linux, but never one with XP on it - presumably because distribution of the complete CD would be illegal...

No reason why someone couldn't modify the method of building bartpe though and add a load of other stuff.

How fast are USB flash drives?

[GPS Pilot]

I've never tried to boot from one. Since flash drives are solid-state, are they faster than a real hard drive?

(I assume that if you're connecting it to a USB 1.0 port, the USB connection would be the bottleneck, and you'd get much faster boot times connecting to a USB 2.0 port.)

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[KillShill]

no. most usb thumb drives and the like have hideously lower performance than a hard drive. the so called "hi-speed" 40-60x flash memory is approximately 10-15 MB/s which compared to recent hard drives are in the 30-50 MB/s range.

if it's cheap, you can be guaranteed that it's around 7MB/s. this is still faster than 52X cdroms (which never reach 52x in the real world). and 15MB/s is faster than 8x DVDs.

solid state doesn't automatically make it fast or faster. it depends on the characteristics of the device in question. flash is getting faster by the year. and there are even some "dual channel" drives which combine more than one flash chip to increase throughput.

next gen flash memory is rated at 40-60MB/s, which
is quite a bit faster than most end-user 5400rpm hard drives and on par with high end disks. of course, you still have the problem of flash being small in storage size. and the biggest devices are no more than 4-8GBs; far too low to be of use in replacing HDs.

still they have their uses. they run cool and take up very little space. these would be perfect for embedded devices and small form factor systems. among many other uses one can conceive of.

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[Pendragn_tk]

All the machines I have that boot off of USB only do so at 1.1 (even though both the machine and the USB key are 2.0). That makes it much slower than a hard drive. Still damned handy though. tk

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[gearmonger]

ATA/133 has a theoretical max transfer rate of 133 MB/sec. USB 2.0 has a theoretical max transfer rate of about half that (~60 MB/sec). A decent USB 2.0 flash drive will have a transfer speed of 8-10 MB/sec. Given that seek times for the HDD probably aren't going to have significant impact on overall load time, these figures suggest that booting from the flash drive will be significantly slower, although probably less than a factor of 10. Just a hunch.

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[hattig]

Not that fast sadly, they're not RAM. I think you'd get more bandwidth out of a 0.85" hard drive!

However the latency should be lower than a hard drive.

Sorry, I don't have any concrete figures. I do remember reading recently that an SD card maker had released a card that was 20x faster than other cards in its class, and was capable of reading at something like 50MB/s now.

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[strcmp]

USB is quite a bit slower than disk access. You can see this if you try to use Portable Firefox, or edit large documents stored on your USB (very long load/save times).

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[Antique Geekmeister]

They're the wrong kind of solid state for speed, and repeated "write" operations will wear them out far faster than a typical disk.

They're extremely useful for occasional boot use, transferring data, and running an OS like the Knoppix live CD os that writes nothing to the bootable media itself.

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about 2.0, but USB 1.0 works well: my thin client boots out of one everyday in 20 to 30 sec.

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[Waffle Iron]

I assume that even the crappiest flash drive trounces any magnetic disk drive on random seek time though.

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're the wrong kind of solid state for speed, and repeated "write" operations will wear them out far faster than a typical disk.

They're extremely useful for occasional boot use, transferring data, and running an OS like the Knoppix live CD os that writes nothing to the bootable media itself.

I was recently checking out PuppyLinux: http://www.goosee.com/puppy/flash-puppy.htm

Full OS install to RAM so it is fast as possible, Firefox browser, etc.

No repeated reads or writes to where the OS is stored. Seriously, to test it just burn a bootable CD, boot from it, then REMOVE THE CD from the drive. Puppy runs just fine.
And includes automated script to make your USB thumb drive bootable - you can even store all your data on the thumb drive and carry the whole personality of your computer on a keychain fob.

Ha! stun your friends when their machine is pwn3d by simply plugging in a small part and power cycle it.

No matter how secure their OS, so long as you can get to the BIOS and enable boot from USB before the hard drive (which it may be by default) you can be browsing their "secure" files in minutes.

It is really nice that the barrier to entry to try out Linux has been lowered to the cost of a burnable CD. Just get the .iso image, burn it and reboot to the CD. See why there are all the Linux zealots out there as well as why others say it is not ready for primetime. You be the judge!

Re:How fast are USB flash drives?

[xander2032]

"which is quite a bit faster than most end-user 5400rpm hard drives"

huh?? Do they even sell those things for desktops anymore? The last time I bought a 5400rpm desktop drive was 1999!!!

I sure hope they're not shipping that slow ass crap on a modern system!

Some screenshots

[mattOzan]

The CD Forum has screenshots from various folks' BartPE builds.

Some people are way too into this. But when you see M$ Virtual PC running from a RAMDrive, that's just pretty cool.

We use a custom BartPE CD at work for data recovery and malware removal. Makes it easy to run SMART checks and copy off critical data from unbootable HDDs.

And you can run Adaware, McAfee Stinger, HijackThis and other tools on a drive without waking up TSR malware.

Works, but a little limited

[HermanAB]

BartsPE has a limit on the number of processes you can run and it has to restart after 24 hours. Despite that, it is quite useful as an emergency Windoze especially since it cannot get infected by crapware. However, even the teenie tiny Puppy Linux has more useful features...

Re:Works, but a little limited

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect, Windows PE has tht limit. BartPE comes with no less than 2 plugins to disable this limitation.

Re:Works, but a little limited

[Anonymous Coward]

links please. Thanks.

Re:Works, but a little limited

[mooboy]

The default PE Builder install ships with a plug-in called PE Loader 0.4 (unchecked by default) that disables the process and restart limitations, and it is perfectly legal.

Re:Works, but a little limited

[ziggy_travesty]

The timebomb thing is because Bart reverse-engineered Microsoft's WinPE. All WinPE copies are timebombed for 24 hours to prevent people from running it as an OS (it has the Win32 API's among other things). Believe it or not, the XP/WS03 release of WinPE works the same way (by copying binaries from a full OS distro).

"The Man" doesn't like...

[NotQuiteReal]

Gee, this is the kind of reasoning my momma warned me about: "The Man" doesn't like ______; all the more reason to use it.

Fill in the blank...
a) crack
b) dirty needles
c) pot
d) fried food
e) Linux

But mom! all the cool kids are doing it!

BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation version

[wrecked]

I've had to make a BartsPE CD so that I could use a Windows-only firmware utility. It wouldn't work in Wine, and I didn't know how to use qemu or the like, so I thought of going through the BartsPE route.

I didn't want to pirate a copy of XP, so I downloaded the evaluation version of Windows Server 2003 instead (BartsPE needs at least XP or Server 2003). Although the Server 2003 evaluation version on the harddrive expired after 180 days, the BartsPE CD created from that install still works.

I found that BartsPE was a real pain to build, because you have to hunt down all the software and drivers, and edit *.ini files.

BartsPE is kind of cool, and is better and faster for accessing NTFS partitions than captive-ntfs, but compared to Knoppix (and its derivatives), it's not that useful.

Knoppix has far more and useful software and networks automagically. Unlike BartsPE, you don't need to build Knoppix, you just download it and burn it to CD.

Virus infects users orffice!!!!

[FragHARD]

So it is just a matter of time before we see the first virus of it kind jump from pocket drive to users back orffice 0=:

Visual Studio .NET

[KefabiMe]

Okay, I'm just looking for help here, so hopefully I don't get flamed. I run both WinXP and SuSE at home, so I'm not a Microsoft fanboy.

This is the question I'm looking to answer:

Can I use Bart PE to carry around a LiveDVD that contains both WinXP and Visual Studio .NET? If not, is there any other way I can do this?

Re:Visual Studio .NET

[HermanAB]

It's been a few months since I last played with Bart's, but I would say yes you could. The big problem is to create the initial Bart's disk - then you can add pretty much whatever you want to the image. Plan on wasting a weekend on it. Note that you need a proper Windows CD which is kinda costly for something that you may end up not using much. A workaround is to download the Server 2003 evalation version from MS and use that to build the system.

Not new, but pretty cool!

[Mr. Cancelled]

Bart PE's been arond awhile! I came across an iso image which someone had put on the p2p networks awhile ago... I think they called it "Windows PE" at the time, but whatever... it was Bart.

Anyways... The iso resulted in a bootable cd which allowed you to boot into a stripped down Windows client, a windows installer, partition magic, and a whole host of other useful (and obviously unlicensed ) software.

It looked to be a very helpful "toolkit" to have, since you could basically fix any Windows boot issues, in addition to performing formats, partitions, and such, with the point and click familiarity of Windows. I remember just thinking that being able to boot into Partition Magic was a pretty neat trick, much less to have a workable system (not 100% "working", but useable).

If I recall, BartPE walks the fine line of licensing by requiring the user to create the Windows discs, using their own personal software, so the p2p version was obviously someone's creation they chose to share with the world, but it was still very cool! At the time I remember thinking that it was more accessible than Knoppix for the avg. non-*nix person, at which this is obviously aimed.

Re:Not new, but pretty cool!

[LodCrappo]

> I remember just thinking that being able to boot into Partition Magic was a pretty neat trick,

Partition Magic has had this capability built in for many years now. Why boot Windows to run a utility that can boot by itself in the first place, out of the box? I'm lost.

Carry Windows Xp around in my pocket?

[frinkacheese]

I think I'd rather carry around a festering rat corpse.. There's enough spyware on my Windows desktop at work (I use it for Visio, NOTHING ELSE!) without having a portable spywarefest in my pocket.

Unstable on USB flash drives?

[Suddenly_Dead]

From the BartPE website:

"Q: Can BartPE boot from USB flash drives (UFD)?
A: Maybe. Does your BIOS supports booting from UFD as if it were a harddisk? The Windows XP FAT bootsector code does not behave correctly when booting from UFD. Bart already "fixed" the FAT bootsector code. But booting from UFD is not stable at the moment. It is very dependent on what exact hardware is used. Some bioses cannot be set to the correct emulation and other systems hang or abort when the windows USB drivers are loaded. Tricky stuff, maybe better support in future..."

(I've used BartPE on a LiveCD, and it works great. One useful link for this is UBCD for Windows, a pretty nice set of plugins.)

Re:Unstable on USB flash drives?

[jonfr]

The pocket BSOD, or RSOD pocket or a mixture of the both, PSOD (Pink Screen Of Death).

Re:Unstable on USB flash drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be Purple Screen of Death. Pink is made from Red and White not Red and Blue. I guess you missed the lesson at school on mixing colours. :P

Since it's illegal anyway..

[MikeFM]

Who has disk images for this? I have no idea where my original Window's discs are but would like to have a handy lil tool like this. Anyone have an image from the Flash Drive they produced this way?

A Flash Drive image for a dual-boot Linux/Windows system would be cool too!

Re:Since it's illegal anyway..

[Mozk]

Is that Windows XP in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

emergency boot disk

[Anonymous Coward]

What, just in case you need an emergency?

USB Problems

[SLOviper]

I use this tool at work all the time - mostly for recovering files from problematic systems and for virus/adware scanning. It works great! That said, I tried putting BartPE on a USB key back about 6 months ago to no avail. It works great right up to the point that XP initializes your USB devices - then *POOF*, no more boot drive. The RAM drive is a clever workaround and I will have to give that a shot. If you're using Dell's, however, I wouldn't expect too much luck. The older Optiplex's don't support USB booting and the newest ones seem to not like the BartPE variant. I did have luck with the GX270 series, however. Just posting my experiences for others to learn from...

http://www.no-install.com

[leftyfb]

I've posted this article and others about running applications and OS's(linux) from USB drives and other portable devices on my site http://www.no-install.com/. There's also a downloads section for registered users (free) to download and post such applications.

Re:http://www.no-install.com

[theinfobox]

I've been playing with a bunch of stuff from No-Install.com and PortableFreeware.com. I even made a collection of these available in a BitTorrent: http://static.thepiratebay.org/downloadtorrent/336 2920.torrent/ThumbdriveApps.rar.3362920.TPB.torren t

For more info on the collection I created a tutorial: http://www.theinfobox.com/index.php/Portable_USB_A pps

Read/write.

[Poromenos1]

Indeed, BartPE is saving my ass RIGHT NOW, the desktop is booted in BartPE and salvaging files after a hard disk (a Seagate Barracuda) crashed a week after I bought it (still no idea how that happened, I have NO luck with HDDs). Booting from the CD takes quite a bit of time, and I think booting off my USB 1.1 drive would take much, much more. Does anyone have a USB 2.0 and has tested it on it? How does it compare to the CD/DVD version? Also, since the USB drive is read/write, it is much easier to run many programs who require to write (although BartPE creates a temporary RAM drive for that reason). Plus, HUGE bonus on being created as drive A:\, as some stupid programs will only back up partition tables, etc on a floppy drive (I can't even find floppies any more).

Re:Read/write.

[FRiC]

Unfortunately, USB 2.0 usually needs drivers to activate. Depending on the motherboard, booting from USB might be really really slow.

Hmm, must try it out now...

Re:Read/write.

[FragHARD]

Hmmm.. Maybe you should stop buying hd's from ebay heh heh....just an idea ;=) If thats not the case think about wrapping your hd's in tinfoil...or sheet lead, I know this sounds a little paranoid but might be worth a try you never know what your neighbors are beaming at your house... yeah I know that sounds a lot paranoid ;=0

Using PE on systems around me...

[kcb93x]

I type this as 40+ machines in the same room as me use PE to launch the installer for our client's baseline system image. It installs the following:

-Windows XP Pro
-Drivers for the system (detects model and installs appropriate drivers, and extra software - like IBM's Rapid Restore Ultra on all IBM/Lenovo machines)
-MS Office (I'm just a monkey here to run this site's deployment, I don't make any decisions)
-Extra stuff used by the client (firewalls on all laptops, burning software on IBMs with burners, DVD players, etc)

All in all, it's a rather powerful (and simple but extendable) automated Windows installer. I like it.

In fact...I think I'll look into this tonight, and tommorow when I'm back in (Hey, overtime is enough reason for me to not play WoW and come to work, seeing as it's 10 blocks to work :D)

Another great couple of options

[billnad]

I have been using the Ultimate Windows Boot CD http://www.ubcd4win.com/ for a couple of years now. It is built on Barts PE and adds a lot of freeware to the mix. Also for troubleshooting I use a Dos boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/that has a tone on software for troubleshooting and fixing as well as a way to shell out to Linux.

Wow.. that's just what I need

[tuxtastic]

Yay. I'm so happy that I can have windows on my flash drive. I wonder what a flash drive core dump looks like?? hmmmmm... gee

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[kayen_telva]

excellent find, trying it now I wonder what the legal ramifications are ?

I'm using partpe right now

[Yogger]

I'm actually using it right now.
my windows machine got a virus, booted up and cleaning it with the mcaffee tool.
While thats running, i'm vnced into my linux box (runs headless normally) and using mozilla to post this.

The sad fact is this is all true.

bootable USB drives -not just for firewire anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, it's cool that pc's can now do what macs have done from day one - which is boot from firewire.

but can mac's boot from usb? ... i didnt think this was possible! (at least usb1; not sure about usb2) ... can anyone elaborate with specifics?

the new opod NANO looks like it would make an awesome boot drive (i was hestiating to buy it for precisely this reason: i didnt know usb was bootable!)

now if someone can only figure out a reliable way to have multiple (bootable) partitions (hfs/ntfs/ufs etc) on a flash drive, then there will be nirvana!

thanx: dlf

Re:I'm using bartpe right now

[Yogger]

and i'm still not bothering to check spelling or preview

I can't wait

[ImaLamer]

To run this at the telemarketing firm where I work. They have just installed brand new Dell computers with no CD-ROM or floppy drives - but they have a USB port right out front.

Can't wait to play games and browse the web instead of taking calls!

Re:I can't wait

[FLEB]

And they say offshoring is unwarranted...

Boring

[ImaLamer]

I've tried all of those...

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[HikingStick]

You're taking a legal risk there. The files on the CD are in support of the eval copy and are not licensed for other uses. That is where MS is going to come back against Bart's PE and similar products. They are not the full MS software, but they rely on MS files to make them work. That places them in the derivative works category. I'll stick with my trusty Knoppix CD. An audit finding that even suggests unlicensed software can cause years of pain...

Unlicensed version of winPE?

[nurb432]

No, i dont think so.

Its something similar, but its not a 'unlicensed version'.

I can finally shit on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Portable Windows XP. Tomorrow morning, I'll connect my USB drive with a really long USB cable and place it in my toilet, with Windows XP loaded on the drive. Then I'll unload on it. And then we'll be even. Heehee...evil genius.

Better than just BartPE

[Jety]

If you're looking for Windows type rescue disks, go one step further and check out the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows - http://www.ubcd4win.com/ It is BartPE bundled with all of the most useful utils, includeing antivirus, antispyware, file manager, disk diags etc etc etc.

Bullshite

[Anonymous Coward]

Bart PE is a completely reverse engineered version of WinPE, with it's own build process. It is not his own code. It uses Microsoft's own code, and boots using 99.999% of the code WinPE uses. It IS WinPE.

Re:Bullshite

[geomon]

Bart PE is a completely reverse engineered version of WinPE, with it's own build process.

Correct.

It is not his own code.

Excuse me?

It uses Microsoft's own code,

You have evidence of that?

If you mean he used Microsoft's SDK to build his reverse engineer product, then you are probably right. In that case, everyone who has ever written code using Microsoft's products, including these folks is illegally copyrighting code. Check out the licensing on the linked website. Those silly people actually believe they own that code!

...and boots using 99.999% of the code WinPE uses.

Where is the proof of your five-nines claim?

It IS WinPE.

Then why hasn't Microsoft's legal division shut them down? Are you telling me that a Microsoft Project Manager knows BartsPE exists and they haven't slapped him with a C&D order?

Bullshite indeed.

Re:bootable USB drives -not just for firewire anym

[pommiekiwifruit]

hey, it's cool that pc's can now do what macs have done from day one - which is boot from firewire. I can't remember firewire being around in the 1980s. It was all Appletalk back then; I can't remember them booting over it either.

Why isn't there a CD-ROM-based LIVE ver of Win XP?

[ivi]

  The Subj is the Question & point of my post.

  Nothing to see here, folks. Move along...

WinBloat lite

[foQ]

Is that a bloated OS in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Seriously, Bart's PE probably takes up 300MB. Double that for some fancyness in the full blown windows XP that MS ships. Why the fuck does the thing take up like 3GB on my hard drive?

Re:WinBloat lite

[Anonymous Coward]

For the exact same reason that you can have a 600 meg game install to an ending point of 1.5-1.9 gigs worth of data.

Data compression. Along with an incredibly long list of drivers.

Re:WinBloat lite

[ne0n]

Is that a bloated OS in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Seriously, Bart's PE probably takes up 300MB. Double that for some fancyness in the full blown windows XP that MS ships.

cut it down by a few hundred megs with nLite. Windows XP need only be 120 MB plus or minus.

not quite sure about this part...

[cinnamon colbert]

You can find information about where to obtain such updates from your PC's (or motherboard's) user manual, on the driver CD included with the PC (or motherboard) or on the vendor's Website."
yeah, right...

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[mikis]

Knoppix has far more and useful software and networks automagically. Unlike BartsPE, you don't need to build Knoppix, you just download it and burn it to CD.

So, how exactly do you use Knoppix to (for example) clean viruses and adware/malware, fix corrupt registry or NTFS drive, or undelete files from Windows system?

I know because...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was the Program Manager who said in that presentation that BartPE was a EULA violation (which was the standpoint of Microsoft legal at the time - I left Microsoft last year, so I don't know, and don't really care, their opinion on it today). I owned WinPE at Microsoft from near inception until just over a year ago.

BartPE is WinPE. WinPE shipped in 2001 on the same day that Windows XP shipped.

PE Builder is the code Bart has done (I don't mean to short-change it - he has done an admirable job of not only reverse-engineering, but improving, the process) - it shipped in 2003 the first time. His build process creates "BartPE" in the exact same layout as WinPE - because it uses the Windows binaries in exactly the same way. Look in the OSLoadOptions line of the txtsetup.sif file in BartPE for the entry /MiniNT. That causes all necessary aspects of Windows to load as they would for WinPE - because that is what it is. MiniNT was the pre-release nickname for WinPE - hence the OSLoadOptions line that never changed (and why WinPE boots from the MiniNT directory when off the HDD).

No, he didn't use an SDK. He reverse-engineered te entire build process for WinPE without an SDK - there isn't one for any part of WinPE. WinPE is built from Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 using a set of tools distributed to those who are properly licensed to use them. PE Builder is an analog to - but a complete reimplementation of - Windows PE's build tool, mkimg.cmd (and it's dependencies).

Would you care to see a windiff of the two to compare the genetics of WinPE and BartPE?

RE: Licensing - Bart has managed to walk a very fine line himself - and he has had interchanges with Microsoft from the beginning. He has kept himself clear of problems by not redistributing BartPE itself. He has put his customers into a potential uncomfortable zone with Microsoft - given that to my knowledge he is not a lawyer, he has bitten off quite a bit if potential liability by advising Microsoft's customers on what their EULA means... But honestly I'm not sure they would ever do anything to a customer using it - since they haven't in the two years BartPE has existed. Any ISV who ever actually distributed BartPE (versus the version of WinPE specifically licensed to ISVs) would most likely find themselves in a legal bind with Microsoft.

Oh, and it's not a Project Manager who would care. Program Managers own technologies - not Project Managers (they track projects).

Re:I know because...

[Master of Transhuman]

Pardon me - I suspect you are a FUCKING LIAR - even if you're not currently working for Microsoft. We know everyone who IS working for Microsoft is a FUCKING LIAR, so I'm afraid you're suspect until proven otherwise.

It seems to me YOUR explanation walks a fine line between claiming Bart's PE IS Windows PE and then saying he "reverse engineered" the entire build process.

Well, if the BUILD process is not yours, then the PE is not yours, regardless of its layout. The point of the PE is to enable Windows to run before being installed. If the files are the same, but there was NO build process except "manually" doing this, what difference does it make if the PE layout is the same - whether it was built by a third party app, or manually?

The bottom line is this: a user is taking their own properly licensed files and using a third party application to construct a PE that works the same as Windows PE.

Clearly the files may be the same, but I see no evidence in your post that there is anything there against the EULA - unless the EULA says that a user may not take Windows files from a hard drive and put them on a CD. Is Microsoft's EULA that precise about allowed usage of the product? Does Microsoft claim that a properly licensed end user of Windows cannot take, for example, one of command line executables, put it on a CD, and run it from there? That's ALL that's happening here.

And since you rely on Microsoft's fucking lawyers for that opinion, it's worthless.

This is fucking ridiculous. One more reason to tell Gates to stick Windows up his ass.

Re:I know because...

[Ravatar]

Choke on the teat of OSS more, paranoid lunatic.

Re:I know because...

[Anonymous Coward]

" Is Microsoft's EULA that precise about allowed usage of the product?"

From Microsoft's XP EULA:

1.1 Installation and use. You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Software on a single computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device ("Workstation Computer"). The Software may not be used by more than one processor at any one time on any single Workstation Computer.

Well, it looks like BartPE just sqeeks by. What an anal, control-freak EULA.

Re:I know because...

[zcat_NZ]

How the hell do you figure that?

The EULA says you can install and use Windows XP on a single COMPUTER. It doesn't say you can 'install' (which is effectively what bartPE is doing) windows XP on anything else such as a CDR or portable USB drive.

And The Entire Point of making a PE-style install on a portable device would be so that you can take your Windows XP install and more easily use it on something other than just the one computer you have at home, which has got to be a huge violation of the 'single computer' part of the EULA. And don't even look at an OEM lives-and-dies-with-the-machine licence!!

Re:I know because...

[mikiN]

Sigh.

Take 10 deep breaths.

Feeling better? Alright.

Open up TFA.

Leisurely scroll down to where it sais "Additional Links"

Click the first one, "PE Builder Project Home Page" ...

Ah well, I'm feeling good today so I'll spare you the clicking and quote directly:

When using BartPE you should know that:

      1. It is legal to make a "backup copy" of ANY files from your original Windows XP/2003 media to another media.
      2. It is legal to add any other files you wish to the backup media.
      3. It is not legal to use a BartPE CD and an installed Windows XP/2003 both at the same time under the same Windows XP/2003 EULA.
      4. It is not legal to change any binary files in the process according to the Windows XP/2003 EULA. This makes "winlogon" and "bootscreen" hacks illegal.
      5. A BartPE image is (and I quote) "not a properly licensed WinPE". This means that if you want to have a licensed WinPE, you cannot use BartPE. However, you can use a BartPE image under the license of the Windows XP/2003 EULA that came with the BartPE XP/2003 source media.

If you still don't trust Bart's intention with this piece of software, AYL (Ask Your Lawyer).

Although IANAL, I rest my case.

re: Windows XP In Your Pocket

[QuietLagoon]

Why, oh why, would I want to allow Microsoft to be that close to my family jewels?

Is that Windows XP in your pocket?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Or are you just happy to see me?

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[krammit]

Try this. May help.

share

[Anonymous Coward]

ltarver@gmail.com
ltarver@idlemind.net
ltoney@idlemind.net
ltarver@msmoc.com

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[cortana]

mkfs

RAM disk version.

[Macfox]

Yes... not only can you boot from other removable media, but RAM disk too.

There's two flavours at the moment. ISO based readonly RAM Disk and the SDI based ReadWrite version. I find the latter the better, as it you don't need a secondary RAM Disk to get things like WMI working etc. The above images ISO/SDI images can be loaded over TFTP (F12 - PXE Network boot), CD, HD, USB, or any other bootable media, for real speedy XP. Oh, once the RAM disk is loaded you can remove the boot media too. :)

If you're interested, a good place to start is
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=9 685&st=0 and http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=1 1048&hl=

On a side note there also a SYSLINUX patch http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/, (Needs a bit more work) that will load SDI images. Currently only works with XPe, so not no WinPE Minint functionality, but it's almost there.

Rob

Trolls... angry trolls...

[Anonymous Coward]

Calm down, man.

XP is in my pocket already

[Anonymous Coward]

My back pocket, that is .... $ $ $ $ $ $ $

Re: Windows XP In Your Pocket

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon - this is Slashdot. It's not like you were gonna use 'em!

Great!

[dhfriedman]

Just the tool I need to boot into Ubuntu when it breaks and clean things up. --David Friedman Bizarro World, GA

Your Kidding THW is just getting around to this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is incredibly silly.

It's been around for more than 4 years and people are acting like it just got discovered.

Bart did his thing back in the day and got busted by Microsoft. That's why its called BartPE now.

The legality is razor thin.. think seriously before tangling with it.

Its the Alpha-Beta version of the Longhorn installer.

Next THW will "discover ADS" it doesn't stand for Active Directory Services any more.

And if you think this is great.. I've got a RIS server I'd like to sell you.. its called PXE..

No luck with hard drives?

[samjam]

Perhaps your PSU is bad? Boot up and then apply a voltmeter to the outputs and see what you get.

San

Re:No luck with hard drives?

[Poromenos1]

I thought of that, but the 2 harddrives I have had for 3 years in it run fine... It is odd...

Bart vs linux boot

[xlioilx]

You can even view/steal other users files that would be locked out with Bart.
I love BartPE But I could do all that with puppy linux and get the SAM in under 5 min and pup had a spread sheet and Word viewer to boot.WTF

Speed?

[Simulant]

Has there been some recent improvement or does Windows PE still boot slower than a snail on quaaludes?

Knoppix blew it a way in speed and functionality both as a rescue platform and as usable system.

Re:or perhaps I prefer to have Ubuntu in my Pocket

[herve76]

Although it's one of the smallest portable USB drives, the Ubuntu H2 is the first Linux solution bootable on an USB Micro Hard Drive.

Ref : Ubuntu H2 : Bootable USB 3GB Micro Hard Drive with Ubuntu Linux

BIOS Update to USB boot.

[_pi-away]

Unless you motherboard is less than a 12-18 months old, don't count on it. It is very rare to see a manufacturer add new features into motherboards older than that.

They will fix serious bugs if they find them, maybe add support for a new type of processor (because it usually requires little effort), but they really don't want to be supporting your board at all any more. They definately don't want to be spending time back-porting code for new features that may very well end up not working or causing problems with your board. Either situation means they have to spend even MORE time bugfixing for this board they just want to be done with.

is that win xp in your pocket?

[voudras]

or do you just like rebooting

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[owlstead]

Automagically, you said it! Besides, it has QtParted with shrink, copy of partitions build in, mounts NTFS (RO if you like) and *if* you use OO.org & thunderbird etc. you can read back all your files. It seems to be way more useful than a XP startup disk. And you can safe your settings as well, all the setup stuff you need to do is saved for that machine.

That did it, man

[Anonymous Coward]

-- I'm fuckin'goin', that's all there is to it.

No need for Bios-Update

[Anonymous Coward]

with my A7N8X-X.
But you can find all updates at asus.com

Re:Why isn't there a CD-ROM-based LIVE ver of Win

[Anonymous Coward]

Because nobody would want to type the licence code and register the OS on a reboot.

Re: Windows XP In Your Pocket

[Legion303]

*Your* family jewels? Didn't read the EULA, did you?

I am only going to say this once

[krunchyfrog]

There is NO WAY that Windows XP will be in MY POCKETS, no matter how sexy it becomes!

ERD Commander??

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use ERD Commander to boot from and fix a windows problem? That's the purpose of it's existence. It's great for popping a locked admin password, file recovery, hotfix rollbacks, etc. Winternals makes a great product. I use it all the time when i'm rolling back a sour hotfix, or recovering the admin password on a machine.

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[canadiangoose]

You use ClamAV with Captive-NTFS to clean viruses.

You use this nifty registry editing boot disk to fix the registry

And you use the linux NTFS tools and TestDisk to undelete/unformat/rebuild lost or damaged files and partitions. I use these all the time, they work REALLY well.

I carry around a copy of Damn Small Linux on my USB key, customized with above tools and including an image of the registry editing floppy and endless other utilities. Not to mention, DSL Linux gives me full access to the Debian APT repository! It serves me very well, especially since it can boot entirely into RAM, so I can take my key out and boot additional system.

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[wrecked]

While I think that the EULA is ambiguous enough to make it risky for Microsoft to actually try to litigate its EULA against personal users of BartsPE (which is probably why they haven't done it), I have heard that the BSA tends to err on the side of false positives when they audit corporate sites.

For that reason, I agree that corporations should avoid the risk of using BartsPE in the business environment. The BSA would tend to interpret any ambiguity as a licence infringement, and the company would have to expend considerable legal resources even if they were ultimately proven correct.

As far as personal use goes, I don't believe there is much risk. As I posted, I have only one copy of BartsPE, I haven't distributed images of my copy, and my hard drive install of Server 2003 Evaluation has expired.

Simple uni-boot CD

[Dog135]

Someone make a bootable image...which boots into several virtualised operating systems - one Linux, one FreeBSD, one Mac OS X, and one of these shrunken Windows XPs.

Simple. Install "virtual pc" on OSX, install windows and linux on that. Then include it on an OSX bootable CD. (or, more likely, bootable DVD)

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[wrecked]

So, how exactly do you use Knoppix to (for example) clean viruses and adware/malware, fix corrupt registry or NTFS drive, or undelete files from Windows system?

canadiangoose in the post above has replied with a number of specific F/OSS tools to aid with system recovery and filesystem forensics. I would like to add that these tools, and more, are included with a number of Knoppix-derived security LiveCD distros. Here is a partial list:

• HELIX and slashdot article on same
• INSERT
• Knoppix STD
• Local Area Security Knoppix and slashdot article on same
• Security LiveCDs article from IBM Developerworks

As I posted before, BartsPE is a cute tool that was useful in running a Windows-only firmware tool, and it is superior to captive-ntfs when transferring large amounts of data from NTFS partitions. However, it feels absolutely crippled compared to Knoppix. Since I mostly use Linux at home and work, I have fortunately been spared the necessity of doing a lot of system recovery and malware cleaning; I cannot comment as to whether BartsPE or Knoppix is better at these tasks for Windows systems.

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[wrecked]

In fact, I did use ubcd4win. Building a BartsPE CD, even with ubcd4win is still a relatively complex process, because the licences attached to the various bits of Windows software does not permit binary distribution of a whole CD image. Therefore, users are required to collect the software parts separately and build an image themselves, each and every time. ubcd4win is convenient in that it collects a number of popular packages to make this process easier, but it still requires some work.

Contrast this with Knoppix, where anyone who remasters it can post their customization for the world to download. Consequently, customizations only have to be done once by one developer, not by every single user. As a user, all I have to do is download the Knoppix remastered *.iso and burn it.

This would explain the plethora of Linux Live CDs, mostly which are Knoppix derivatives and to some extent SLAX. Contrast with the BartsPE world: there is huge dearth in the variety and selection of software for Windows LiveCDs. Further, the Linux LiveCDs are full operating environments, completely identical to hard drive installs, whereas BartsPE (and ubdcd4win) are only intended as recovery platforms.

SATA data rates are...

[Laebshade]

SATA-I (or simply SATA) is 150MBps. SATA-II is double that at 300GBps. Wikipedia to the rescue!

Re:BartsPE and Windows Server 2003 Evaluation vers

[absurdist]

All of these alternatives are peachy, but they still don't address the one most valuable use of BartPE. Namely, the ability to run adware/spyware scanners from a clean environment. Unfortunately, there's nothing equivalent to Ad-Aware or Spybot S&D for windows that will run off a Live Linux distribution, TTBOMK.

Windows XP In My Pocket?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just about every day, something that looks like Windows XP comes out of my ass. Why would I want to carry that around in my pocket?

No!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Don't know about 2.0, but USB 1.0 works well: my thin client boots out of one everyday in 20 to 30 sec.

Aaaargh, I blew it again!

The OS image is on a flash module mounted on the IDE interface (this known as a disk-on-module). Throughput must be a lot greater than USB 1.1.

Sorry if I unwillingly misled anyone. I meant no harm.