More on Booting! Booting in to Safe Mode

Just a little addendum to my posting on Booting Windows the other day: an excellent article on CNET about how to Boot Windows XP in to Safe Mode when it is reluctant to do so. Even makes a reference to how to get round the problem of booting in to safe mode with a wireless keyboard which is not initialised till Windows has fully booted...(it basically confirms you need to get hold of a PS2 keyoard fast! LOL).
Article is by "Gary P." based in Atlanta:

http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-10149-0.html?forumID=7&threadID=120306&messageID=1364848

Zone Labs - Zone Alarm - the Basic Firewall Free Version

Ever needed to download the Zonelabs ZoneAlarm basic firewall and found it hard to spot on their site?
This link to the ZoneLabs Home Office products downloads should help get you there quicker than usual

Then select the final column option ZoneAlarm Free Download for non-business use only.

Backup software - trying Acronis True Image

Just installed the trial of Acronis True Image 9, following its recommendation in a review of Backup Software in the March issue of PC Pro Magazine.
So far impressed with the 15 day trial. The programme seems to be able to do everything but the kitchen sink, including restoring images from a repair Boot CD.
One thing I found encouraging is that the Help File goes out of its way to let you know that when doing an image restore via a boot CD you can insert the source CDs from which the Restore will be taken and temporarily remove your Boot CD. It's courteous of them to let you know and increases one's confidence in the product, especially if you have only one CD/DVD media device on your machine, and single combo drives are becoming increasingly common these days. The old practice of giving users a two-drive system, one for playing DVDs/CDs etc, one for burning them, seems to be dying out.
Another neat feature, noted in the PC Pro review is the ability to set how processor-hungry the programme will be during its routine.
(Though I would add that when I was running my test creation of an C:\ drive image, with processor cycles set to Low the programme was still running at 100% in Task Manager. Could this be because I had also asked for Max compression I wonder?).

Booting problems

The other day I needed to get in to a PC that wasn't booting up properly in to Windows XP Professional. I knew the problem wasn't the hard disk as the machine was booting as far as the XP Professsional splash screen, pausing and then looping back to system boot. The problem was, it wasn't going in to safe mode either. I could have dearly done with a boot CD that could have enabled me at the least to get to the file system. Here's what I found, a fantastic programme that will build a boot CD for you. It's called BartPE

And it's Freeware, though donations are accepted.AKA Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD BartPE is Admin's best friend... And it does the job very well indeed. This is however not a programme for beginners, and there is a lot to take in to account before diving in.

The programme works by building an ISO image from the install files, which are either copied directly off your install CD or off your hard drive. For reasons that will become clear, it's better to have the install files stored on your hard drive. If you have XPSP2 installed, or anything above service pack 1, you will need to "slipstream" the service pack install files into the main install files on your hard drive. The programme documents how to do this, and offers slipstreaming as one of its modules.

However, in my case, I could not get the Bart PE slipstreaming to work properly, and took the advice of one of the forums for Bart PE, and made use of another programme called nLite...Which is also freeware.

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

Now nlite did a brilliant job of the slipstreaming, creating a combined source install folder containing elements of my original XP install files, with the SP2 install files "slipstreamed" in. Again read the documentation/help files before attempting it all, and you should get your slipstreaming done OK.

Then I returned back to Bart PE, and built the ISO image from the source files without a problem.

I then burnt the ISO image to a CD (which becomes bootable), using Nero Burning ROM, though any amount of burning programmes will be able to handle the iso burning for you.

It was then a question of testing the boot out.

Remember to go in to your BIOS and make booting from CD the first booting option, and hard disk booting the second option.

Once I'd done all that, Bart PE loaded beautifully. I had a file manager, the ability to copy to floppies, partition manager (which I didn't trouble myself with exploring), just an endless array of options.
The additional beauty of this programme lies in its plug-ins, which are really worth exploring.
One of these Deep Burner, the portable version of which can be added to your Bart PE build to enable CD burning in the BART environment. This could be a real life-saver, if you just want to pull crucial data off your C:\ drive before doing a full reformat/reinstall of Windows XP.

I also added the latest version of Stinger (the McAfee/Network Associates basic free virus scanner and virus remover which can dig you out of a hole in an emergency) as further plugin.

Worth exploring all the plugins and see what ones take your fancy, or what you really need.

Bart PE is an amazing piece of programming, and all the more remakarble for being a free download.

Take a look here, on the help2go site, for a tutorial on using Bart PE with screengrabs - v. useful



Further Useful Boot CD Links

• BootDisk.com a site with a massive array of boot disk information and downloads
• myBootDisk - Basically a rather tiday and useful collection of links to utilities of all sorts, and oddly enough to Kazaa Lite
• PcBeginner.com - powerful, bootable rescue CD for Windows XP. Not Freeware, looks good. Have not tried it myself