Heads-up Mudcrab, Mustang et al

Hi folks,

this month's PC World here in the UK has a feature on moka5.com who have a freeware baremetal virtualisation tool that can be installed on a USB key and which can then host virtual OSes including a full version of XP or Linux.

With USB keys readily available now in 8Gb and even up to sizes as large as 32Gb, might it be possible to use that to create a single USB key that had everything you need for a TI restore ON A SINGLE USB KEY? i.e. it had...
- a bootable OS
- access from the OS to TI
- access from the OS to DD
- ***AND***...
- access from the OS to your .tib image files
- access from TI to your .tib image files


Is it possible to create a single-USB-key-restore capability currently using Win PE or BartPE and Mustang's plugins? I have created a bootable USB key thus far, but only 2Gb/FAT16 and with no apparent way to place a .tib file on the USB key even if I was able to use one that was sufficiently large.

Finally, for this specific task, why would you want to use WinPE over BartPE & vice versa.


Thanks for all your hard work thus far and thanks in advance for any answers to the above.

Regards,
Just Parsin

 

You probably need to format the key drive as NTFS if you want files larger than the FAT limits.

 

Windows and the Full Mode of TI place "restraints" on how USB flashdrives are detected and used. It can make this type of setup hard to do. Safe Mode will usually see multiple partitions on a flashdrive okay, but it's usually slow access if the BIOS supports it.

If you have TI (or BartPE/VistaPE) booting from a large flashdrive in FAT32 format, I think it should work as long as the image file was split to a size that would allow it to be placed on a FAT32 partition (4GB or smaller splits).

I haven't tried an NTFS formatted flashdrive to see if it would work or not. As far as I know, neither Media Builder or PeToUSB will create an NTFS formatted bootable flashdrive so it might have to be created manually.