Quick Notes On Getting Bart's PE/Ultimate Boot CD For Windows To Boot From A Thumb Drive

    I was listening to Pauldotcom 115 when Larry or Paul were talking about their key chain. One of them said they wished they could have Winternal's ERD Commander boot from a USB flash drive, well you can have something very similar. Bart's PE Builder lets you run a striped down version of XP off of a CD/DVD or USB flash drive. I use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows ( http://www.ubcd4win.com/ )  version since it comes preloaded with tons of useful plugins and drivers. One of them is Sala's Password Renew that lets you reset passwords in much the same what as ERD did (but Sala's tool does not have to to use hash insertion which can sometimes mess up your box). Other plugins include malware removal, network tools and disk utilities. I also have plugins on my website for getting Cain to run off of it.

The utility I use to put UBCD4Win on a UFD is called ubcd4winToUSB, which comes with the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows distribution and can be found in C:\UBCD4Win\plugin\!Critical\ubcd4winToUSB . It does not seem to work in Vista, so do your build from a Windows XP SP2/SP3 box. After installing it to my 4GB thumbdrive it kept giving me a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) with the error code 0x0000007B whenever I tried to boot it. I found someone provided a patched version of ntdetect.com (http://www.msfn.org/board/0x0000007B-Blue-Screen-Error-During-Text-t112630.html&p=738009#entry738009 ) that solved my problem and now it boots fine on all my boxes. By  the way, I use the Super Talent Pico_C 4GB ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609295) since it's so small and easy to fit in my pocket.

Here are some other useful links for you:
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/barts-pe-builder-intro
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/pebuilder
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/backtrack-bartpe-dual-boot
 

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