Aomei Pe Builder

I'm always trying different OS's and boot disks. Just found AOMEI's PEBuilder. It gives a mini desktop GUI along with it's standard recovery access.Some tools built in. Wordpad, 7-zip, Q-Dir, Recuva, a photo viewer and surprisingly plays gifs.

It let's you add portable tools of your choice to the ISO. I'm going to add a few I like such as Autoruns, Process Explorer, maybe a disk editor utility and such.

I made an iso from my 8.1 and another from my '7. Both work on the other with no problem. And the one from 8.1 even boots in secure mode with no interaction required. Except for the old 'press any key to boot from cd/dvd'. Neat.

But right now I don't have it where it starts my wireless correct or the sound system and in device manager it shows a lot of usb subsystems as not started.
Any one else ever use this? Any ideas on standalone troubleshooting tools that would be good for a recovery/troubleshooting enviroment.

I'll probably burn a few cd's/dvd's before I get it like I want or burn over a thumbdrive a few times and it maybe a work in progress for a while.

 

I've got the installer for PE Builder and even installed it on 8.1 but I couldn't figure out how to add device drivers to the mix either.

I remember using .inf files for slipstreaming Win XP.

When you've mastered PE Builder, could you post some tips back here?

 

So far I've added a bunch of programs I sent to a "standalone" folder and then added the files when making the iso. These included autoruns and process explorer. Both gave me some indication of files it was looking for but didn't find. I'm going through these and also the drivers listed in the regular 'device manager' to try adding some drivers for the next run. So far I've an 8.1 boot, a '7 boot, and an 8.1 with quite a few trail programs to see what works and quite a bit of it does work. It's neat that I can take it to another comp and boot with it. All other drives are seen also. It's been quick- about 15 minutes to gather the files and set up the burn. Haven't tried to usb yet. On dvd I'm up to about 800mb now. Soon to try usb.

 

I've been using it off and on now messing with what apps work while in the PE system. I've been impressed. It will read all my drives/devices. Can run programs from any drive as long as they are standalone programs. (most portable zipped programs).I've run freebasic, some games, Tweaking.com's Technician Toolbox. It starts everything for a ethernet connection but I only have wireless so haven't tried connecting. Wish I could.

Also found that in the version I have (1.5) NTPWEdit has been removed as one of the integrated tools. I downloaded a copy and placed the unzipped files in a 'NTPWEdit' folder and added it as one of my tools. Burned just the standard and this one extra folder and tested it on my system. When ran from the PE it showed the standard 'administrator' and all 4 accounts I have on this comp. I changed the password to one for a test and it worked. All this was 515mb so it could fit on a cd.

I've had times when a friend's family member actually forgot their ms logon password and it took a re-install to get the computer back.Luckily it made a full backup. But with this cd now it's a 2-minute fix. That alone makes it worth the time to build.

I'm not advertising for AOMEI but you can do a lot with this free tool.