10th February 2004, 12:38 am
Ok, finished up my BartPE CD last night. WOW! That’s all I can say. I copied the format of the Compaq Smart Array Driver plugin and created a plugin for the HighPoint HPT370 IDE RAID controller on my motherboard. Spent some time downloading the files needed for the plugins I wanted (it includes the interface stuff and instructions, but you have to get the actual files yourself), then let it make the ISO. I burned it to a CD, then restarted and booted off it.
It installed both my ethernet and HomePNA network cards, got an internet IP address via DHCP, Nero loaded up and included my CD-RW just like in my regular WinXP install, and I could access the NTFS partitions on my RAID drives. BEST BOOT DISK EVER!
Now I just have to get every util I’ll ever need added in, and I’ll be set.
I highly recommend this to anyone who can figure it out. It’s not AOL-easy, but it shouldn’t be too hard for anyone with moderate geekiness.
9th February 2004, 04:04 am
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Bart’s PE Builder helps you build a “BartPE” (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, very suitable for PC maintenance tasks.
It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800×600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.
This will replace any Dos bootdisk in no time!
I was following this a few (probably about 8 now…) months ago when it was dealing with the legal side of things, and was temporarily unavailable. I had forgotten about it until I stumbled across it in a search for other info last week. I haven’t actually made mine yet, but I plan to soon. I thought it looked awesome back then, and it only seems to have improved since then. It can be extended via plugins, which appear to require a bit of manual work to install (downloading programs or including your own licensed versions).
It’s really a basic version of Windows XP on a CD or DVD. This means it can get around some limitations imposed by any form of DOS boot disk (even if it’s emulated on a CD). You can access storage devices not detected by the BIOS (USB or some fibre channel devices) and very large (>2TB) NTFS volumes. Obviously not a huge deal to everyone, but if you need it, you can’t really do without it. The process for making this CD, especially with lots of custom stuff, is probably above most AOLers, but if you’re interested in this sort of thing, you can probably handle it.
1st February 2004, 06:59 pm
A friend just sent me this link. It’s a search for all post-SP1 patches for WinXP. Download all of those and burn them to a CD. Then you can install your slipstreamed WinXP SP1 and have it fully patched before ever getting online with it. It’s also handy for getting all the patches to archive, for your own use or for someone else who doesn’t have broadband or something.