Can anyone tell me of a bootable CD/program I could use to boot into a Windows-like GUI and have access to added software? I tried ERD Commander 2003 from Winternals but I can't seem to add my own stuff.

Many thanks,

Jeremy

BartPE + Plugins ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BartPE

Yup... BartPE is the way to go.

But to add my own stuff, I need to make CAB files?

Does BartPE support USB 1.1/2.0 so that I can run anti-spyware programs from my USB stick and update them, without having to make a new ISO everytime updates are out? That's just an unreasonable amount of hassle.

You might consider Ultimate Bood CD 4 Windows. It is much better than Bart PE, as it builds on top of it.

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

-John

Try BootIt™ NG

I still floppies for boot disks. There are no single drivers that work on all computers (especially for Intel vs AMD), therefore, I abandoned the idea of putting them on CD.

Really, there only two boot disks I really use: Norton Ghost 2003 and Partition Magic 8.0.5.

Here's what I did to make booting faster. I made a 15 mb FAT partition on my hard drive and put the Ghost.exe and partition magic files on that partition. The floppy boot disk is just the usb, firewire, cd, and mouse drivers.

my autoexec.bat points to the hard drive to call ghost or partition magic.

Granted it take a little while for floppy to boot but once it's up, it's a zip running ghost and partition magic from hard drive.

I've got other DOS utilities on my 15 mb partition.

I also made a custom menu on my floppy to load with or without USB, FW, CD drivers. So for a quickers boot, I just choose option 1 to bypass USB, FW, CD drivers if I know I won't need those devices.

I'm not using pathetically slow obsolete floppies as a boot method. I don't have a floppy drive nor do I have the drivers for it (thanks to nLite). If I want portable storage, I use my OCZ Dual Channel 512 MB USB stick. Thanks anyway for the suggestion.

For me

The reatogo is the best for the XPLive CD

http://www.reatogo.de/

it has been said ppl have gotten BartPE to boot from usb keys, this should make it much easier to update than having to keep burning cds over and over again, i personally use cds as i dont have a usb key.

I would suggest you take a long look at all the help files and manuals for BartPE to see what you want from it. I have personally tried both Ultimate Boot CD 4 Win and Reatogo and both are pretty crap if you want a decent fast PECD, they add an unimaginable amount of rubbish that you will most definately not use.

different people have different ways. i still like the floppy for the quick boot to dos.

I've got BartPE (or was it UBCD4Win?) booting off of a 512MB usb key. On one system, the boot process is very slow, but on another system it is faster than booting from CD. So YMMV.

-John