With these steps completed, we’re done with the basic preparation and can move on to actually creating our bootable rescue CD or USB stick. To do so, we start the executable pebuilder.exe in the PEBuilder directory. In the program window, enter the path to the Windows XP installation files in the top line beginning with “Source:”. If you’ve followed our naming scheme, then the path should be :\Rescue-Disk\XP-Source. Leave the entry BartPE in the third line unchanged. Under “Media Output”, we can choose whether we want PEBuilder to create an ISO image or burn this to a CD or DVD right away. We chose the option “Burn to CD/DVD”. If you’re using the same options as us, then you’ll have your first own Windows XP-based rescue CD within minutes after clicking the “Build” button. We recommend using rewritable discs for testing.

For now, we leave the CD in the drive after burning the disc and restart the computer. In order to be able to boot from the CD, we’ll have to tell the BIOS which drive to boot from. You can either do this by changing the boot sequence in the BIOS itself or by accessing the boot menu by pressing either “ESC”, “F8” or “F12” while the BIOS is at the POST (Power On Self Test) screen. You can consult the manual if you’re not sure whether your motherboard offers a boot menu. Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, boot your system from the rescue CD.

To keep the image of the rescue CD as slim as possible, BartPE does without the Windows XP interface. The same goes for some of Windows XP’s applications and tools such as the Device manager, Windows Explorer and the Start Menu. Instead, BartPE uses an alternative file manager called “A43” that is launched via the Start Menu replacement “nu2menu”. Other than that, the functionality of our rescue CD is rather limited at this point if you’re looking for more than access to the file system and the network. On the other hand, this is easily enough if you’re only looking to simply copy and save your files to another computer.