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Bart’s Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) Windows LiveCD

aaron — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:30:39 +0000

As much as I love the old school Disk Operating System (DOS) environment, the benefits of working with DOS, even for firmware updating, is fading away. Who has a floppy drive any more? Well I do, I purchased one with my Dell laptop and even though it is the slide in type (pull out the CD/DVD drive), it has a USB connector on the side of it. However, when it came time to create a bootable floppy, I couldn’t find any disks laying around. So, create a bootable DOS CD – still has limitations if you try to emulate a floppy.

Regardless, the 1.44MB limitation is irritating at minimum. Working with 1.44MB floppies today is almost as bad as working with old DOS programs in Windows 95 that can’t figure out how to use extended memory (above 640KB). It seems that many firmware updates are larger than a floppy, and if you try to fit it along with the bootable files, MSDOS.SYS et cetera, you’ll be quite unsuccessful. So, screw DOS boot disks – let’s make a Windows LiveCD!

BartPE

To ensure that everyone knows, Bart Lagerweij is the master mind, I am merely shareing my experiences with his exceptional work.

Go ahead and review Bart’s PE page. Download and install the latest PEBuilder application from that link. You should also review the licensing notice.

In this example we are going to create a Windows XP PE LiveCD. To get started you will need a Windows XP Professional non-OEM CD, which Bart’s pebuilder application will use to create the bootable LiveCD, and a blank CD for the final product.

Note: unless you have two CD drives, I would recommend copying the contents of your Windows XP cd to your hard drive.

Open Bart’s PE Builder and set the source to the location where the Windows XP files reside. Under media output, choose “Burn to CD/DVD”. Click on the Builder menu and choose “Build ISO/CD (F5)”.

Assuming you receive no errors during the build and burn process, you should now have a bootable Windows XP LiveCD.

-Aaron Gilbert

Mac Mini with Windows XP

aaron — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:03:38 +0000

The Intel based Mac really opened up some doors that may not have been supposed to be opened. Installing a rival operating system on a Mac? No way. However, because the system is Intel based, this is possible and it works fairly well. Because of the size of the Mini, the company I work for deployed a Intel based Mac Mini as a Kiosk system located outside of our main facility.

Although you may scrounge your own collection of drivers if you so desire, there is a package already out there that has all of the drivers you need for the Intel based Mac Mini. Why recreate the wheel?

http://macxp.furbism.com/

The above link details the installation process quite well. In addition the Mac Mini Windows XP drivers are located at the above link.

Enjoy.

Memory Stick Not Assigned a Drive Letter

aaron — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 02:53:28 +0000

This is a common issue with Windows XP Pro and mapped network drives. Occasionally corporations will use mapped network drives for easy access to various network shares. You may notice this error on networked computers that have more than average local drives. An example would be 2 hard drives (C: and D:) and two CD or DVD drives (E: and F:).

A mapped network drive apparently does not “lock” the use of the drive letter and Windows will allow other devices that are attached at a later time to assign themselves a drive letter that is already in use via a mapped drive. As stated above a system with 4 physcial drives would use 4 drive letters which would normally take A: through F: (A: and B: are automatically assigned to floppy drives regardless if you even have a floppy drive).

So if you map a network drive file://server/share to drive letter G:, and then plug in a memory stick, there is a good chance that Windows will assign drive letter G: to the memory stick. The mapped drive will continue to work, but you will not be able to access your memory stick.

Resolution:

Make sure the memory stick is plugged in.
Right click on My Computer and choose Manage.
Under Storage \ Disk Management you should see the memory stick, and which drive letter it assigned it.
Right click that Memory Stick entry and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Choose an unused drive letter. It should stick with this newly set drive letter everytime for that memory stick.

Note: This guide is for informational purposes only. Use the information provided at your own risk. I am not responsible for your actions or the outcome of any method or instruction given or used in this article.