Misc Utilities

[Scott Hauser]

Hi,
I am not sure where to post this so I will post here. While googling for info on booting from usb flash drives, I found this page:

http://www.nu2.nu/bootablecd/

I thought some of the utilities might be of value to some of you.

Scott

[Theo Gottwald]

Yes, but a more in-depth description for what this shall be good, why you recommend it etc. would be good.

Just to threw in a link, looks sometimes like search engine spam.
Therefore if you recommend something, say why. And why this and not for example KNOPPIX etc.

[Scott Hauser]

Hi Theo,

He has various utilities to create bootable cds for restoring systems and networks. Some are free to use and some are commercial. I am going to try to utilise one of these to make a bootable usb key drive. It will be a few days before I can report on my experience with any of these as I am on the road for few days.

[Scott Hauser]

Well I finally had some time to play with BartPE obtained from my earlier posted site. It is very powerful, but way more horsepower than I need since my environment is single user desktop only. My overall impression is that it is a handy tool for a system admin who needs to service several nodes, perhaps with multiple OS and settings.

I found another nice utility called nLite that allows you to remaster your Win2000 or XP install cd and remove any unwanted components before building the new iso image. The utility uses red syntax coloring to indicate components that it suggests should not be removed. It will allow you to remove them anyway if you wish. It also allows you to pre-enter your CD KEY so you don't need to enter it at install time. Another sweet feature is the ability to pre-install a service pack before building the iso. In my case, I was able remaster all 4 of my Win 2000 SP1 disks with service pack 4. You can get it at:

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

FYI, I was incorrect in my reply to Theo regarding some of Bart's applications being commercial. They are free downloads. Both authors, Bart and nLite will accept donations.

[Marco Pontello]

nLite is really nice. I used it recently to prepare an XP install for the Eee PC, stripping away some unneeded things like themes, wallpapers, product tour, etc.
The ability to slipstream other drivers, fix, and tools is interesting too.

Bye!

[Donald Darden]

Even though BART PE says it is for XP Pro, I found I could create bootable CDs with Windows 2000 Pro and XP Home as well, and incorporate the service packs at the same time.  Win2kPro fully incorporates SP3, but SP4 will install itself after the first reboot, which saves some time downloading and installing later.  So it is easier and faster to reinstall Windows than the original disk.

Speaking of Utilities though, I am one of those people that feels that a defragger is an important tool for your system.  I'm not sure how much performance is actually lost when a drive becomes fragmented, but I do know that having the files rewritten to the drive occasionally does help with long term retention.  And while the free tool that comes in Windows might do a basic job of it, that it isn't very smart or capable.  Years ago I decided the task of defragging was important enough that I would pay for a decent utility.

I began by using Diskeeper, but after a few years, the tool began showing its age, and a trial use of PerfectDisk proved to be much better.  Now that I've been using PerfectDisk for awhile, I am again considering if I should think about upgrading to a more recent version.  Both PerfectDisk and Diskeeper have a version 2008 out at this point.

I donwloaded PerfectDisk 2008 and gave it a few test runs, then I did the same for Diskepper.  I was much less happy with Diskeeper, because it gave me no progress status, and as far as I could tell, it would work awhile, then appear to quit.  And it was spreading files out on my drive, not compacting them.  I suppose there are different theories about what a defragger should do, but Per4fectDisk let's you choose one of three schemes to implement for yourself.


The real differenced showed up when I decided to uninstall Diskeeper.  It wouldn't.  The service would not stop, and started up each time I rebooted.  I had to use the Admin Tools and edit the local services in order to tell it to stop, and even then it only said it was stopping, never stopped.  I ended up having to delete the Diskeeper Corporation folder as well, then running Registry Mechanic to clean up the mess left in my Registry by having to forceably remove Diskeeper.  That's not something I want in a product.

But to cap things, today I got an email with a discount coupon from Raxco to buy PerfectDisk 2008 at 20% off, as long as I place my order by the 31st of March.  So I reckon I will.  First I have to see if that beats my upgrade price, or if I can use it with my upgrade discount.

I know that in the past, people have suggested that you could go with free tools for this purpose.  But my problem has been, that many tools have proved to be inadequate with the really large hard drives and massive amounts of data that I put on mine.  They either bog down or run forever.  What I see with PerfectDisk is that it manages to finish the job in a timely fashion, but it does this by not attempting everything at once.  Every time I ran it, things got a little bit better in the way they were laid out.  My old version would treat the whole partition as a series of zones, and only tried to restructure the folders and files within a given zone.  The new version seems to treat the whole partiton as a single unit, and I can see it working its way through the contents, but not quite finishing the job.  Still, because it runs in the background most of the time, it would tend to keep pushing towards a state when all the folders and files were laid out uniformly.

Since both products offer free trials, you might want to try them both and make your own decision.  You really do not want to have both, because they would tend to work against each other, as they are based on different models of what a defragger should do.  And like I said, getting Diskeeper off might be a consideration, because it took some added effort. Diskeeper also gave me a nag screen every time I rebooted, which I did not much care for.  PerfectDisk did not bug me this way.