If you do troubleshooting on Windows systems you probably know about BartPE already. If you don't, you're probably not as good at your job as you could be. BartPE is like magic. It makes Windows Boot CDs onto which you can install programs like anti-virus scanners and scan offline. Lots of problems are easier to find and easier to solve offline.

I wrote about BartPE years ago and even gave a contribution to Bart, but as you can see from the home page—"Version 3.1.10a (released on Feb 17, 2006)"—Bart hasn't been working on BartPE that much lately. It's hard to make a living in the free software business asking for handouts.

BartPE has always existed, I think, just off the edge of legality. It's a tool for making a copy of your Windows installation, and therefore, effectively piracy. Microsoft hasn't ever made a big deal of this because BartPE is an undeniably good thing for Windows administrators and I'm sure there's lots of sympathy for Bart in Redmond. But that doesn't mean Microsoft shouldn't make its own tools of the same type.

And so it does with what it now calls the "Malware Removal Starter Kit." That page links to a .DOC file telling you how you can download and install the Windows Automated Installation Kit, which allows you to make Windows PE boot disks. PE is Windows Preinstallation Environment and is a limited version of Windows used for tools such as this. Symantec's Ghost product, for example, comes with a boot disk based on Windows PE.

It's not the end of the line for BartPE. There's a small but enthusiastic BartPE community producing plug-ins, and they'll continue to work, and an XP-based BartPE will continue to be useful for years. But WinPE has some advantages; direct vendor support through the products means it's maintained and tested more than BartPE. It's even possible to get network access on WinPE, as I've done on the Ghost disk. And any app that runs as a BartPE plug-in should run in WinPE. There are WinPE limitations, at least for now: It doesn't run IE7, nor does it support Windows Installer (.MSI) apps.

I'm going to have to build myself a test disk with WinPE some time soon. I may end up using it, but unlike with Bart, I won't be sending any contributions in to Microsoft.