Friday, June 1, 2007

BartPE - Stripped Windows on USB






This is pretty neat to have, especially if you're in IT. Think of it as a free version of ERD Commander. There are tons of plugins online including file recovery tools, office viewers, xp shells, network utilities, internet browsers, etc. You can equip Bart PE with all these plugins, but you may have to go through a slight debugging process. I use it pretty bare with just Adaware, BGInfo, Office 2003 viewers, ERD tools, and Remote Desktop. It also comes standard with good ol' chkdsk. It's definitely not an OS replacement for me, but I've seen people get pretty crazy with it.

Here's a basic step-by-step I created for myself with a Windows XP SP2 VLK CD (OEM's not recommended):


PE Builder 3.1.10a (download here)
  1. Download and unpack Windows 2003 SP1 by running WindowsServer2003-KB889101-SP1-x86-ENU.exe -x (that’s assuming that you downloaded the English version). Note the -x parameter that will allow you to specify a location to unpack to. We’ll be assuming C:\server2003sp1.
  2. Create a folder named srsp1 in your pebuilder directory.
  3. Copy C:\server2003sp1\i386\setupldr.bin to srsp1.
  4. Expand and copy ramdisk.sys by running expand -r C:\server2003sp1\i386\ramdisk.sy_ to srsp1.
  5. Start PE Builder from the Start Menu. Point “Source:” to the location of your Windows XP SP2 CD drive
  6. Make sure the “Output:” is set to “BartPE”. If using SP2: go into the Plugins configuration dialog and enable “RpcSS needs to launch DComLaunch Service First - SP2 only”.
  7. Custom add plugins for Adaware, ERD Commander, BGInfo, etc. (You will actually need to grab certain files from these programs, they are NOT included)
  8. Hit “Build”.
  9. Launch a command prompt and browse to the pebuilder folder
  10. pe2usb -f k: (replace k: with the drive letter of your flash drive)
For a list of plugins, try:
http://www.bootcd.us/BartPE_Plugins_Repository.php
http://oss.netfarm.it/winpe/
WinPE is the official microsoft version and is only available for SA Benefits customers. Plugins work on both apparently.

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