Wayne I think if you have a minute and the inclination you should forward your comments directly to Fred. I'm sure he would include your thoughts in a subsequent article. With your experience in this area, it would make a valuable contribution to the knowledge of a number of folks.
Regards Vince Vincent Winterling Vineland, NJ -----Original Message----- From: Windows Home/SOHO [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Wayne Johnson Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 7:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: FYI: Langa Letter: XP On Your Thumb Drive 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=17710210 1 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. -- ---------------------------------------- To Change your email Address for this list, send the following message: CHANGE WIN-HOME your_old_address your_new_address to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Note carefully that both old and new addresses are required.
