Beginner's Guide to Creating a BartPE CD with a TI Plugin

Thanks for your reply Tom.

Standard BartPE runs ok but cannot see a USB drive.
XPE freezes with "Creating WMI Supository"
Reatogo freezes with "Detecting PnP Devices"

How much do you want for a copy of your CD?
$20 ... $50 .. $$$ ... you name it.

I still find it hard to believe that Acronis are selling a product that doesn't work.
And it's even harder to believe that there isn't any other software on the planet that can image an "ordinary" PC and an "ordinary" Laptop.

With your disk I will just copy every file to the USB drive.
And when it's needed I'll install WinXP and then copy all the files on top and hope for the best.

I do mean it, name your price and send me your disk.

Bill

 

BillOld,

Do the CDs you have made work in other computers or do you see the same error messages?

 

Hi Bill,

Don't ask to buy somebody's disk. That is illegal.

The first thing you need to do find out is if the problem is related to the USB drive you're using. Borrow a USB drive from a friend and see if the regular BartPE disk will boot on your computer and see it. You should also try to boot the regular and Reatogo disks on the friends computer and see what happens. If that works, you need to buy a new USB drive. BartPE should see USB drives, this is a very unusual problem. You should also try plugging your USB drive into all the different ports on your computer.

You mentioned the XPE disk freezes on WMI. You should disable the WMI option. Open pebuilder and hit the Plugin button. The XPE options will all say Sherpya and be grouped together. Highlight the WMI option and hit the Enable/Disable button. The Yes in front of the WMI line will change to No. In XPE you also need to disable the Startup Group plugin and the NU2Shell plugin. After you make these changes, make another disk and see what happens.

In Reatogo, did you run the AutoDriver function? On the main Reatogo screen, hit the Create Driver Plugins button. On the next screen, hit the Start AutoDriver button. On the next screen, hit the Detect button. Check off the boxes for your network, storage, video and sound drivers. Finally, hit the create button. Then make another disk and see what happens.

 

BartPE for Vista?

Mustang - are you working on a BartPE for Vista?

I'm able to use the BartPE CD i created with XP to backup/restore the Vista system drive; I'm wondering if you're working on a pe builder that would run on Vista.

Thanks

 

Hi jelenko,

No. Bart Lagerweij wrote pebuilder. I don't know what his plans are for Vista.

I have been able to run the current pebuilder on a Vista system. You need to use a WinXP source disk. I had to copy Reg.exe from a WinXP system to the Vista Windows\System32 folder to get XPE to work. The InfCacheBuild script didn't work as it depends on WinXP. I don't know how Reatogo runs on Vista.

 

Re: BartPE for Vista?

What features of Vista would justify ditching XP as a rescue disk ?

F.

 

Re: BartPE for Vista?

None right now. But, as Vista becomes my primary 'workspace' I'm wanting to be able to use all my 'tools' within Vista. Otherwise, I have to shutdown, change drives, reboot. Not a disaster, but certainly more convenient.
[Yes, I don't dual boot - too many oopsies in the past.]

 

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

 

Hi Brian K.

The Reatogo CD won't boot on the PC that created it.
It boots on a laptop but freezes with "Detecting PnP Devices".

You're in NSW !! I'm in SA, can you send me your CD for free as a birthday present (not 'sell') and I'll reimburse you the very costly postage?
Only joking Mustang, . . . . . . I think.


Hi Mustang,

I'll try again tonight but from memory some answers are-

>"The first thing you need to find out is if the problem is related to the USB drive you're using."
The USB drive works under XP, I have another one so I'll try that one with standard BartPE tonight.

>"On the main Reatogo screen, hit the Create Driver Plugins button.
I did that and selected all checkboxes and then create "

The first time I tried Reatogo I copied my BartPE Plugins into Reatogo \plugins\.
Since then I have read a post that said not to do that so I deleted the Reatogo plugins directory and reinstalled Reatogo.

Both times I did all the tasks in the "first run" list until I got all the green flags, including create driver plugins.
I then used it without any other changes, I assumed that it would have the best chance of working with everything else set to the defaults.

 

BillOld,

If you want to create Reatogo CDs quickly for testing purposes then you only need to perform Step 2. You can omit Steps 1,3,4,5.
At the bottom of the PEBuilder box I do this....

Tick Burn to CD/DVD
Tick AutoErase RW,
Tick Eject after burn
Burn using StarBurn
Select your Device
Click Build

I suggest RW discs until you get it correct.

Why don't you try this without adding any of your plugins. Not even the TI plugin. We just need to see it boot and show your internal and external HD. If it doesn't boot, disconnect the external HD and try booting again.

 

Thanks Brian,

I couldn't do much last night so I decided to concentrate on the basic BartPE because it is the simplest and it is the only one that will boot into the splash screen and Go button.

I have enabled only the minimum number of BartPE plugins. None of mine and not TI, etc.

All programs and system utils seem to work ok.
The only thing that doesn't work is that nothing can see a USB drive.
On one attempt I loaded a small app that I created with a drive combo on it and it couldn't see USB as well. So it's nothing to do with the supplied file browser plugin.

I tried 2 enclosures and each drive in them as master / slave.
Win XP can see all 4 combinations, Bart PE can't see any of them.
I also tried a brand new burner in each enclosure with the same result.
I then tried a fairly new flash drive to remove the enclosure/HDD combinations. It can't be seen.

I have been creating ISO files and then using Nero to burn to CD-RW disks.
I keep each ISO so I can go back to previous versions at any time.

I don't think the problem is to do with the USB devices, I think it must be something fundamental that I have/haven't done.

I think I will delete everything and go back to a fresh install of only BartPE and then tread very carefully.

 

Bill, you know BartPE works except for seeing USB devices. Have you considered that the fault may be your computer rather than the CDs? Could you try your CDs and external HDs with other computers and let us know the results?

 

Once you have the BartPE GO button, try powering up a USB drive. Open up Window Explorer and see if the External comes up in the structure tree. In the command line, type in the external drive's letter, example: E:\ , and see if you get access.

Works for me...

 

Mustang,

Are you able to answer my question above?

Karl

 

Hi Karl,

Sorry, I thought thomasjk had answered you question in post #122. His answer was correct. "Yes it does."

 

You are correct, I missed that post. To refer back to my original problem then, since I can not Slipstream, do I just skip it?

Karl

 

Hi Karl,

Yes.

 

BillOld, when you installed your USB drive did you have to install special drivers for it or did windows find it automatically? Can you describe your hardware in detail to see if it's something unique to your hardware. I've always been able to see USB hard drives and flash drives in BartPE. I'm assuming you have the USB drives powered on or in the case of flash drives plugged in before startting BartPE.

 

I have never been so lost in my life....I tried using PEBuilder, then tried reatogo--I presume they both do the same thing, if you can get there. I am not sure that the plugin is there, as the list doesn't show it, even though I ran the .cmd from both programs (confusion as to what to do when is the first issue). Anyway, tried to build a disk and getting these errors:
Error: loadKey() failed: Error: DeleteFile() "C:\REATOGO\REATOGO-240\REATOGOPE\I386\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\petmphive" failed
Error: DeleteFile() "C:\REATOGO\REATOGO-240\REATOGOPE\I386\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\petmphive.log" failed
Error: DeleteFile() "C:\REATOGO\REATOGO-240\REATOGOPE\I386\SYSTEM32\setuphiv" failed
Error: DeleteFile() "C:\REATOGO\REATOGO-240\REATOGOPE\I386\SYSTEM32\setuphiv.log" failedError: DeleteFile() "C:\REATOGO\REATOGO-240\REATOGOPE\I386\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\petmphive" failed

Any ideas?

 

Thanks for your replies Brian and Thomasjk.

The PC is about 2 years old and doesn't have any unusual hardware or software installed.
The laptop is a 2 months old Toshiba Satellite Pro A120.

I'm not sure about the PC but the laptop detected the USB HDD without having to load drivers.
I thought XP can get the USB device to load its drivers when it is first detected, is that correct?

I am now going to delete everything to do with BPE,XPE,Retogo, and do a fresh install of BartPE only.
I will leave the plugins selected as they come.
I will also try it with only the menu and file browser plugins.

Is USB support provided by a plugin or is it native to BartPE?

 

Sawbonz,

You don't have the Reatogo-240 folder in the C:\ root.

Your C:\REATOGO\REATOGO-240\REATOGOPE\I386\SYSTEM32\...... should be

C:\REATOGO-240\REATOGOPE\I386\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\

Try it that way and report back.


PS You need to start again with reatogo-240.exe in the C: root.

 

BartPE doesn't require a USB plugin.

 

Thanks Brian,

I kind of came to that conclusion by creating a disk with all default selected plugins and one with only the menu and the A43 file browser, and they performed exactly the same.

Here are todays results-

Bart reinstalled and a CD created on PC1 -

PC1 (2 yearold) recognises the USB mouse but A43 sees no USB drives.
PC2 ( 2 weeks old) won't recognise the USB mouse.
The Bart PE "Go" button won't respond to Alt G (Go?), Alt S (start?) from a PS2 keyboard so thats where it ended for that PC.
PC3 (laptop 2 months old) A43 sees no USB drives.

Bart installed on the laptop, XP CD copied and SP2 slipped, and a CD created on the laptop -
Laptop gets a BSOD and says it cant find Winsrv.

All above used various USB devices, etc, repeated, etc.

The common denominator seems to be my WinXP/SP2, or the newness of my hardware.

That's the 5th full day!
I think I'll give up.

Please >>>>
Does anybody know where I can buy a bootable CD (or flash drive) with USB support, either as a single item or as part of a larger product? <<<<<

I just need the bootablle CD because I have a GUI interface for nfgdump that I think will allow me to image the laptop drive to a USB drive.

 

I don't know what to say BillOld. I have a desktop and a laptop which both have USB mice and both machines work properly with BartPE. I can also see USB drives with BartPE using A43. Note that the drive labeling in BartPE may not match excatly what you expect becasue of a ramdisk added as drive B:, CD Drive(BartpE) is X: and C: stays the same. Your other drives may have different letters. On my desktop I have WINXP Home Retail and on my laptop I have WINXP HOME OEM. My personal opinion is that USB chip sets vary so much that not all software sees them. You may want to look at DriveImageXML as an alternative to TI. Its free.

 

Bill, what brand are your computers? Dell? I recall the Dell WinXP CD has a problem with BartPE.

Have you tried building a BartPE CD on each of the 3 computers? If so and it failed I'd find a good friend and do the whole process on their computer, using their Win XP SP2 CD. Boot the completed BartPE CD in their computer and see if it can access an external HD. If it does then try that same CD in your computer. Don't worry about plugins until you can see an external HD.