When I started working on XP Embedded and preaching this thing to our customers, one of the drawbacks I have is to demonstrate copying the image into a system which is already packed. I mean, the system is already inside a chassis and you can never remove the hard disk to copy the image of XP Embedded to it.
So I have to search for tools and software that allows me to deploy the image or analyze the system without the need to open up the chassis.
Along the way, I have resorted first doing the old ways of boot diskettes. And I learned a lot of stuff from bootdisk.com.
But I hit the wall of old school floppy booting when the size of the harddisk expands to more than 32GB as this is the limit of FAT32. And the NTFS nightmare started.
Man, why did windows introduce such file system within giving the primitive people some primitive-like tools (DOS -based) to around with it.
Later on I found out about Pre-installation environment. WinPE (by Microsoft) and BartPE (by Bart not Simpsons). Of the two, I leaned too much on Bart as it is more customizable and provides a much easier interface compared to the scripting I have to do for WinPE.
Both of these applications will allow you to create an ISO file that you can burn to a CD bootup the system.
But the thing with CDs is that it just seem obsolete and bulky these days.
It took me at least 2 days to finally use PEtoUSB to deploy this Pre-installation Environment to a USB Flash for a more comfortable and portable way.
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