Solo Technology

Last week I needed a way to easily make an image of an ex-employee’s hard drive. And, as is often the case, finding a way to do that without spending a chunk of money would be seen as a good thing. Oh, and there was a third factor — a chance to finally try out Bart’s PE Builder along the way.

Bart’s PE Builder helps you build a “BartPE” (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from [...]
It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800×600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support.

I’ve been reading about Bart’s PE Builder for years, but have never really found the need to give it a try. After 10 minutes of research (aka a web search) I determined that BartPE would be an interesting way to boot the PC without “disturbing” the installed drive.

While I was doing that search, I saw some articles mentioning folks that were using BartPE along with a program called DriveImage XML to make drive images for purposes such as mine (and other interesting “forensic” uses). Runtime Software, the folks responsible for DriveImage XML even have a page about PE Support and a helpful video on getting it all put together.

So what’s DriveImage XML all about?

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

The program allows you to:

Backup logical drives and partitions to image files

Browse these images, view and extract files

Restore these images to the same or a different drive

Copy directly from drive to drive

Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler

Seemed like just the ticket, so I downloaded it. How could I go wrong with two free solutions?

I grabbed my XP CD and prepared to build my PE disk. To make things simpler I went ahead and copied the XP CD to my hard drive (I’m assuming that’s the simple way, at any rate)

The PE Builder software is very easy to use and I had my boot disk built quite quickly. It was time to give it a shot.

Grabbed a large USB drive, plugged it into the PC to image and hit the big red button. Tossed in the CD and encouraged the PC to boot from it. A minute or so later I was in DI-XML and making my image.

Painless and just that simple.

When it was all done I copied that image to a file server and then used the DI-XML “browser” feature to have a look. That works quite well, just like browsing a drive.

A couple days later I needed to replace a hard drive in a laptop. Turns out that’s a good use for the BartPE and DriveImage XML combo as well. Booted the laptop from the BartPE disk and made the image. Took just under an hour to image 60 GB of data to a USB drive. I then popped in the new hard drive and booted back into BartPE and did a restore from DI-XML. That took about 60 minutes as well. Worked flawlessly.

I see that there are a bunch of “other” BartPE plugins available. I wonder what else I could use BartPE for? Anyone else using it and have some suggestions?

I see this as an interesting alternative to the typical Linux boot CDs that I’ve used in the past. I’m still trying to decide what makes it better (or worse) than those, but I can definitely say it was a pleasant and painless experience…

One Response to “Bart’s PE Builder + DriveImage XML = Simple”

1. » pingback » Living and Learning with XP: Imaging and Licensing » Solo Technology on April 8th, 2008 6:11 pm
   
   

Leave a Reply