A Zero-Footprint, "Live CD" Version Of XP
(From the LangaList archives) If you ever have to recover files from an unbootable drive or try to bring a dead PC back to life, here's a free, zero-footprint tool you shouldn't be without.
It's a self-contained, CD-based "live" copy of Windows XP. Like the popular "live CD" versions of Linux that can run entirely from a CD-ROM without installing anything on to or making any changes to a system's hard drive, this version of XP lets you boot and run just about any PC without altering anything on the system itself.
The CD-based version is completely self-contained--- you can think of it as a zero-footprint installation of XP--- and yet is "...a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS file system support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on."
And it's free!
I've been experimenting with it for a while now, and enthusiastically recommend it. So much so, in fact, I devoted a new InformationWeek column to it. It starts with screen shots, showing you what it does and exactly how it looks in operation (on one of my PCs here), and then goes on to provide links and info so you can download the free tools to build your own copy.
This is one of the best, if not *the* best, foundation for a CD-based repair/recovery toolkit I've seen to date. With native NTFS support, plus support for networking, file sharing, and Remote Desktop Connections, it's powerful and flexible, and yet the XP-derived interface makes it familiar and easy to use.
Click here for full info on this must-have repair/recovery tool!
The article, like the tool itself, is free!
3 Comments:
While this is probably a great product it requires that you have the original installation CD's.
Since most computers come with Windows XP pre installed the installation CD's don't come with them.
Too bad..
Process Explorer by Marc Rusinovich could make your life much easier. Just find sysinternals.com (from the top of my head, and it's free utility), install.
It's much more rich than system task list utility, and if you navigate by your mouse over any svchost.dll, you just see all services attached to it, automagically.
Plus, it could do many other things.
And it's free, and no need to tickle with Microsoft Defender, free or not free.
This "Bart's PE" can be handy at times. But it is all too often unable to do what I need. Sometimes because it it missing features and sometimes because it just does not work at all.
What? Not work at all? Yup. The most common use I have for a 'rescue' CD is to get data off a crashed Hard Drive before replacing it or perhaps only re-imaging it. Usually Bart's will work, but I have had many cases where it would not because of the condition of the drive or files on it. Just this past week a I watched a coworker try to save an image of a crashed HD (PQDI image maker) which failed, save the files with Bart's PE (would NOT boot), and WinXp crashed with a bluescreen everytime.
Bored, I watched till he gave up. Meanwhile, I burned a copy of PCLinuxOS (Ubuntu and others work as well), and popped it in when he was done. Booted just fine, got a graphical interface just fine (but a commandline interface will also work), and connnected to a server, saved the files using multiple copy windows for speed, and was done in 20 or 30 minutes. Less time than he spent without any success.
I saw later that he made of copy of the PCLinuxOS CD for himself.
But I do use Bart's to edit boot.ini and some other stuff as I trust it a bit more to write to NTFS at this point.
Jerry
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