Create a Live Windows USB stick
It’s a well known fact that windows-based computers tend to be quiet temperamental. Often, all it takes in a seemingly harmless e-mail embedded with a little-known virus or some minor glitch in the windows registry and your system can be mercilessly brought to its knees and rendered unusable.
Using a windows live USB stick, you could recover data from an ailing hard drive with a corrupted master boot record; surf the internet without having a trace on the host system; use an instant messenger to ask a friend for assistance; view and edit your documents on the gol defragment locked files and even burn CD’s.
All that’s required is a USB flash drive, a computer with an internet connection and a licensed windows XP Installation CD. Note that the USB device you are going to use have enough space (minimum 512 MB). For starters, this technique will only work on fairly new computers manufactured within the last two or so years that are able to boot off a USB flash drive. For older machines, BIOS updates may be availble to resolve this issue. Also, while a large number of devices will be supported by this windows live USB stick, hardware support is still quiet limited and you may not be able to get peripherals such as your webcam, scanner or printer to work.
Softwares that we’ll be using to create thsi Live Windows USB stick are Bart Lagerweij’s free utility, PE Builder, which condenses files from a windows xp setup CD to create a compact and portable version of windows that includes all the essential tools you need to avert a PC disaster.
Additional applications can be added to the BartPE setup through the use of plugins. These include both freeware and commercial applications, such as anti-virus programs like NOD32, CD/DVD burning applications like Nero and PDF editors like adobe acrobat, etcetera and are available at the BartPE plugin respository.
Let’s get started, below is a list of files you will need before proceeding with the create of the live USB stick.
Now assuming that you have downloaded all the required applications:
1- Drag the contents of your windows XP setup cd into a new folder called WINXP on your hard drive. Although, this isn’t mandatory, it will substantially speed up the creation of the live USB disk image.
2- Extract the contents of the pebuilder zip file into a new folder called ‘PEBuilder’. Next, double click the plugin subfolder and create a new folder called ‘XPE’ here. Now, extract the contents of the XPE plugin into this folder.
3- If you wish to add free utilities such as stripped-down version of Firefox or a MS word replacement to your BartPE installation, download the relevant plugins and extract their contents into the ‘plugin’ folder of the PEBuilder directory, otherwise you can skip this step.
4- The default BartPE installation provides limited support for network cards. To ensure, that your adapter is recognised properly, you will have to extract the contents of the UBCD4Win net drivers and place them into the ‘NET’ folder. This folder is located inside the ‘drivers’ folder in the PEBuilder directory. The ‘Net’ folder will now contain several subfolders, each with its own set of drivers.
5- To be able to access all kinds of hard disks in the BartPE environment, first extract DriverPacks base to a new folder called “Base”. Next, double click the ‘DriverPacks’ folder located inside this folder and place the MassStorage drivers there.
6- Now, run the file DPS_base.exe located inside the base folder. After selecting your language, move to the location page by clicking the button twice. Under ‘Installation platform’ select BartPE, followed by ‘Yes’. Click Browse and point to the location of the plugin folder located inside the PEBuilder directory. Move to the next page. The MassStorage text mode option will already be selected. Click on the ‘SlipStream’ button to complete the process.
7- Next, run the pebuilder.exe file located inside the PEBuilder folder to start the program. After accepting the license agreement, when the program asks to seach for windows setup files by itself, click “NO”. Under the source field, point to the ‘WINXP’ folder you created earlier.
8- Click the plugins button at the bottom of the windows. In the new window that appears, you will a list of programs with “Yes” and “No” prefixes. To enable or disable an item, select it and click enable/disable button at the bottom of the window. Note that all the of items available here are free to use. Disable all the redundant items listed below:
- A43 File management utility.
- Bart’s Stuff Test (Free edition).
- BartPE Installer V2
- Driver SnapShot
- Nu2Shell
- PENETCFG: Automatically start PE network configurator
- PENETCFG: PE Network configurator
- Startup Group
Click close and you’re done.
9- In the PEBuilder program window, set ‘Media output’ to ‘Create ISO Image’ and specify a file name like liveusb.iso. Click the ‘build’ button and agree to the prompts that appear to begin the create of the live usb key image. Close once the process is complete.
10- Now install UltraISO to your hard disk. After running the program, select File > Open and point to the ‘liveusb.iso’ file you created. Next, connect your USB flash drive to your PC, select, ‘Bootable’ follwed by ‘Write Disk image’. Under ‘Write Method’, ensure USB-HDD+ is selected. Hit ‘Write’ and in a few moments you will have your own live windows USB Stick.
As a final step, you’ll have to change the system’s boot order through your PC’s BIOS setup utlity. BartPE should now load. Depending on the speed of your USB drive, this may take a while. To have an even greater variety of applications to work with, load your USB drive with useful portable applications.
Guide by Taha Majid
4 Comments
After booting. Setup error ‘ INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 18. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit’. What is the problem? how to clear this ….??
Mine boots ok, but 2 or 3 seconds after starting to boot from the pen aborts with
I got “cannot load \minint\system32\bootinfo.inf” error code 1
BahH!!! this doens’t work!