At 06:59 AM 1/23/2006, Lou typed:
A way to create a bootable thumb drive;
http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177102101
This article says nothing that we haven't covered on 911cd.net but I
didn't let that stop me since sometimes a fresh look at things
reveals new insights. There are many issues with Bart's PE Builder.
One of them is when you right click on the exe & go to properties you
can NOT see the version # or any information like you can with other
exes. Another issue is Bart did not take into account that some
plugins work well together others do not. I tried for over a year to
get Bart to address this issue & he basically told me to take a hike
that it was his project & he was going to do it his way or no way.
In the article it states one needs to create a folder SRSP but it
can't be just anywhere but it has to be <PEBuilder>\SRSP. Well I had
subfolders in between because of the various compilations that I
created. While PEBuilder.exe can be in any folder & run well as long
as the subfolders had Plugins but this is no longer true when running
PE2USB.exe. PEBuilder.exe must be in a root level folder called
PEBuilder & the stuff from Win2k3sp1 has to be in a subfolder of
PEBuilder otherwise it won't run so if I have the SRSP folder under a
folder called 3.14 it won't work period. Also I use to have a folder
called Working under PEBuilder where the files were dumped prior to
the ISO creation but now Bart says that folder MUST be named BartPE
otherwise PE2USB won't know where to find the files. Once I dotted
the i's & crossed the t's according to Bart then PE2USB works but
what the article does NOT tell you is that it creates an ISO on the
thumb drive which is bad news because in order for the thing to work
one needs at least as much memory on the system as the size of the
ISO file. No where does Bart warn you of this & neither does Langa
probably because he doesn't know about the problem but I have a 1g
Sandisk Mini Cruzer & if I put a 900meg ISO on there then it
certainly wouldn't boot on a system with only 512meg of ram. Another
problem with using ISOs on a thumb drive is that they have to be
extracted on bootup & this takes a heck of a long time. I'd just
rather create BartPE on a 3.5" CDRW & be done with it. I don't have
the building issues nor the system memory issue nor the compatibility
issues from machine to machine & the thing still fits in ones shirt
pocket. YMMV but probably NOT.
Bart came out with a new version of PEBuilder.exe just last week & as
a result I'm recreating my XpPe compilations to suit. Not only was
Bart's PEBuilder updated but so was my major XPE plugin by Sherpya
updated. Unfortunately there is no real structure to the more complex
plugins as one can put almost anything they want in any inf file &
sorting out all the items in these can be mind boggling & numbing,
tracking down things that I don't like or need to correct so that all
the plugins play nice & because of this I'll probably have several
trial builds to get the kinks out & I'll run them in a VM before I
ever burn my 1st CDRW disk then I'll probably have several trial runs
& re-burns even then.
So while one can download Bart's PEBuilder & pretty much run it as
is, the real power & work is in the plugins & adding the tools that
you want & running things the way that you want.
Once that is done then I can build my EZBoot DVD that runs Knoppix &
others as well.
-----------+----------
a Windows Xp based
Diagnostic & Recovery CD
<http://www.xppe.com/>
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