Thankfully, creating a rescue CD has also become a very simple process over the past few years. By automating many of the steps, the tools we chose for this project, namely BartPE and PeToUSB, save you both lots of work and a lot of time. Nonetheless, we won’t get around dealing with a good number of files and some manual copying. Creating a working and feature-rich recovery disc is a project that takes many steps, and so good preparation is essential.

For one thing, a clear directory structure in which to store the files belonging to the project helps you keep an overview. To this end, we created a folder called “Rescue Disc” on our hard drive containing the following subdirectories – PEBuilder, Plugin-Binaries, Plugins, srsp1, Tools, XP Data, and XP-Source. We’ll also need a full Windows XP Professional installation CD with SP2 included. OEM versions and installation media from computers that came with Windows XP preinstalled will not work for our purposes. Furthermore, make sure you have enough free space on your hard drive. In the end, our project folder weighed in at almost three gigabytes.

Next, we fill our freshly created directories with the files and programs needed to create the rescue CD. Primarily, we will be using PEBuilder in version 3.1.10a or above. Simply extract the contents of the Zip Archive to the folder PEBuilder. Next, unpack PeToUSB to the “Tools” directory. Copy everything on the Windows XP (SP2) CD to the folder called XP-Source. We’ll only be needing the directories Plugin-Binaries, Plugins, srsp1 and XP Data in the later steps.