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

[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

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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: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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.