WinPE Recovery on USB Stick for Windows XP System?

My wife's netbook has Windows XP and no CD drive. If I do regular system images using Drive Backup 9 Professional and want to have a bootable recovery medium ready, what is the best one to use?

Along with DB9Pro I received the WinPE-based image download. Can that be put on a small (2GB) USB stick and then the system booted from that if/when I need to do a full restore for some reason? Or is there a reason not to use the WinPE image and stick with the stock recovery-media builder function?

P.S. I need to make a recovery medium for my own laptop which has a CD/DVD drive, is there a reason to prefer that to the USB?

 

The WinPE CD is preferred over the Linux CD (created through "Recovery Media Builder" ) when you need additional hardware support, for instance raid controllers. With the laptop situation, the Linux CD is all you need and optional to create as a USB stick.

To put a WinPE on a USB stick, you have to use the Recovery Media Builder, and point it to the WinPE iso file. First run the WinPE.exe extractor, instead of burning to CD, extract the iso to your desktop. Run Recovery Media Builder, instead of Typical, use the customer image and point to the WinPE iso image.

 

So now that I've done those steps and created my WinPE-on-USB recovery "disk" it sounds like there's no reason not to use it on one laptop or the other if the occasion arises. Probably overkill but what the heck.

Thanks, Tommy.