http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

For all you windows administrators/techs/users

Disclaimer: I am not an expert when it comes to BARTPE, so some of what I am reporting here could be bogus, these are just my findings after I took the time to build a custom windows boot cd with it.

While this is a very cool project people who are used to the ability to customize these installs will be disappointed. BARTPE (pebuilder) is a nice way to setup a quick bootable windows CD, but the shell interface had to be rewritten to avoid MS reigning fire on them along with a few other things and OUCH this takes a lot away from the experience. Their shell does not compare to the standard windows shell at all just look at the screenshots.

Most importantly you have to use a Windows CD to create your custom build, meaning all the patches released after your current Windows XX install CD are not on your booted CD, so you can forget about using the Internet. Adding programs is also not the easiest and can only be done by writing a special plugin for pebuilder, but is possible.

In general if you start out with this disc it might be what you are looking for, but coming from a Knoppix CD and then going to BartPE it will be a slap in the face. You literally boot this CD play your game, or scan for viruses (which is slower than using a straight bootable virus scan) then shutdown the computer.


A nice thing about BARTPE though is that you can view large NTFS volumes, even encrypted ones. However, overall the "enhancements" did not seem to be as spectacular as one would expect (this expectation is obviously set by Knoppix) and I think that just using individual bootdisks for tasks like virus scanning or quick NTFS stuff are the way to go.

In closing, there might be other applications that I did not think of that people can share below. Again I looked at this program with a certain goal in mind and when I read Windows Bootable CD I figured I could customize it anyway I wanted, which was not the case.

If you "slip stream" sp1 or 2 into your cd than create your PE cd with that cd the patches will be included. I have a "custom" BartPE cd with additional software that wasn't on the original build from Bart.

I made my own Bartpe win Xp pro Dutch with Sp1 and some other tools installed running there.. I think it is a great tool for emergency's and can be needed in other times aswell

Serhat

Great ! Iwas looking for such a windows.
Thanks a lot