How to Make a Windows XP Boot Disk

Video transcription

Did you know that a boot disk can be used to correct some problems with XP if you can't get it to start up. Hi, I'm Dan Afonso, from Afonso Consulting and Enfold IT, and this is how to create a boot disk for Windows XP. We're going to be using the BartPE method. BartPE is a boot disk creator developed by a guy named Bart that allows you to boot your machine into XP in a useful way, so you don't just get a limited command prompt. Now, we're going to start off by going over to the BartPE site. The link will be next to the video. So here we go, going to go down to download. You're going to click on the download link, and pick, a pick a mirror close to you. I've already downloaded it, so we're going to just skip this step here. When you run it it's going to give you the usual warning when you download something from the Internet, select your language. And since I'm not going to keep this I'm just going to select all the defaults, and I don't really mind; sure, create a desktop icon. And here we go, okay it's runnin'. Now it comes up; it's going to ask you to first confirm the license agreement, which says you can't do anything bad with this software. It's not allowed by the XP license agreement, and that you know, this is Bart's software and you can't screw around with it. That's fine; want to agree to it. Search for the windows installation files? No, I don't think so. I'm just going to point it at my CD Rom, which already has the Windows XP in there. The custom is if we're want to add anything custom to this installation; any stuff you want to be able to have, so if you need a terminal program or somethin' like that this is where you'd put it in. The output file, fine, I'm going to use the default. Now, for the output you can either do an ISO file, which you can burn a CD with later, or you can just burn the CD/DVD. And if you choose to burn you can you know, erase the DRW, you can have it eject, that sort of thing. I'm just going to create an ISO file, so I'm going to click build. It says Hey, that directory doesn't exist. No problem; go ahead and make it. Make sure you agree with Windows XP's licensing agreement, so don't be handing this out on the Internet. I agree and there it goes. In a few minutes it'll spit out a fully functional ISO file that you can now burn a CD from and boot something else. Now, I'm doing this in virtual, so I'm just going to boot up the file from this, I'm just going to boot up the computer from this ISO file directly. All right, so to show how this works now I am just loading this CD into a virtual CD drive on a virtual machine. So, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to use my Windows XP Professional image, and now I'm just going to start to fire up with yet, with the BartPE disk inserted. So, I'm going to fire it up. Want to get our boot screen. Thank you VMware. And now, instead of going into Windows here it is going into BartPE. Now, we can start up network support. Just use the HCP; that's fine. And with network support we can now grab files, move them off. We can get data off the machine if we need to, or look at stuff if there's an issue. Your programs are available here; at least a small subset of them. You've got a few options. You can take a look, you can partition your disk, you can check your disk. You can add a ram disk if you need a little bit of temporary display, and you can change a few things around just to get it to run. Also, you can run anything from the command prompt, and if you put additional programs onto the disk you can now run those as well. So, this is how you run a, this is how you create a boot disk for Windows XP using BartPE. I'm Dan Afonso. Thank you. Have a good day.