New alternatives to BartPE?

merc141

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 24, 2007
Messages
194
I was looking into bootable CD/usb media and it seems BartPE is outdated. Are there alternatives that are designed to work with modern OS (win7 and 8 primarily)? I just want to run various utilities, antivirus, disk utilities, etc to fix systems (especially ones that won't boot.) It seems its been years since reatogo has been updated. Is UBCD still viable? Has microsoft made WinPE available for free yet? I have been out of the loop for a bit so excuse my ignorance.

What do you guys use instead of something like Bart PE? Feel free to reply with your favorite or most useful utilities or anything that can help with general repair. I am going to prepare some older systems to donate and have another that won't boot at the moment. Thank you ahead of time.
 
WinPE is now indeed "free" starting with Windows 7. It's a pain in the ass to just get a basic CD going of it though as you have to download the WAIK (huge) and do a bunch of shit (command line) before it actually generates an ISO you can burn. It's not as easy as just downloading and burning an ISO. If you want to customize it, it can be even more of a pain as you might need/want to mount WIMs or modify the file/folder structure and throw some more stuff on there. Otherwise, you just get a command prompt for your shell. I wonder if anyone has come out with a WinPE shell of their own that you can use now? Something to look into...Admittedly last time I did anything with WinPE was about a year after Windows 7 came out so I'm sure third parties have come out with shells and more programs they claim run fine in that environment.

But with that said, I created a custom shell myself for it in Visual Basic 6 and made a nice little CD for the company I work for that we use for some basic stuff like mapping network drives, loading a WIM, and running KillDisk to wipe the disks. Every program (admittedly not many) I've tried has worked fine (try to find "portable" versions of apps) including some webbrowser I can't recall the name of and a file browser/copy utility. It can be pretty versatile if you have the time to research it or have a different shell you can use/build.
 
WinPE isn't that hard to get going... plenty of tutorials that will talk you through whatever you want. Who uses CD/DVDs these days, though... spend $8 and get a 64GB flash drive. That way you can edit everything on the fly and keep your antivirus/antimalware definitions up to date.

With a USB drive, you're just extracting the WinPE stuff to the USB drive and running bootsect to make it bootable. It's really not that hard.
 
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