mOS for Vista: WinPE, WinRE and Bart

With Vista, one loses some friends and gains others, with Vista-64 being particularly challenging. You can use XP-based Bart to do many things in Vista (especially hardware diagnostics) but nothing has the ability to redirect registry access on the fly as RunScanner does for XP on Bart, which is a significant limitation for Vista maintenance.

The players are:

• MS WinPE 2.0 for XP, 2003 and Vista
• MS WinRE for XP, 2003 and Vista
• Bart PE, current XP/2003 version
• Bart 4 for Vista, XP, 2003 etc.?

Bart 4 is but a rumor at this time, and may stay that way awhile. As MS WinPE 2.0 is now available to general users, and as Bart has experience with earlier MS WinPE, he may develop a GUI front-end for that instead (I'm just guessing here, but that's what I'd do).

My Vista Curve blog will cover WAIK, WinPE 2.0 etc. as I grow my Vista maintenance skills. There are also walk-thoughs for building MS WinPE 2.0 solutions, and blogs from the Microsoft WinRE and WinPE teams.

I was going to develop MS WinPE 2.0 as a separate mOS project, but a better way might be to cross-develop Bart PE to be used as an extension of the MS WinPE environment. This is suitable for techs with an \i386 file set, but is tricky otherwise. On the other hand one could easily build a gutted Bart with no bootability, no OS, and just the nu2menu interface to collected tools.

MS WinPE 2.0 seems harder to build and use than Bart PE. The Bart equivalent of those 4-page walk-throughs is "install Bart PE builder, run it, and follow the UI that pops up". Once you have the skills, similar things should be possible in MS WinPE 2.0, but those who find the Bart skills investment too high will bounce off WinPE.

MS WinPE runs in RAM, allows the boot CDR to be removed, and allows arbitrary CDs and USB sticks to be hot-swapped - so the potential is there to launch your Bart CDR from a MS WinPE boot via an accessible "pull tab". On the Bart side, you'd either have a Vista-specific nu2menu, or logic within the menu and/or plugins that filters and modifies things to work (or not be offered) in Vista.

My Bart project is already down this road, built for compatibility with...

• Running from output subtree on the build PC
• As accessed from DOS diskette boot
• Autorun from Windows 2000, XP
• Autorun from Windows 9x
• Booted into Bart mOS

...so adding "run from MS WinPE boot" is just an extra step.

You can already manually run a Bart PE CDR's menu from an MS WinPE boot session. Some tools don't work as needed code files or registry settings aren't present in the WinPE runtime, and that may be a ball-breaker to fix. Some tools don't run due to permissions issues, and may run if it were possible to do the equivalent of right-click, Run as Administrator within the WinPE environment. Others work just fine.

The nu2menu system has some breakage when run from an MS WinPE 2.0 boot. So far, one issue I've picked up is that the very useful GUI file/folder selector feature fails to populate the namespace tree, so you can't use that to set Temp etc.

As an MS WinPE builder, you'd likely have or will soon build skills in XML. The nu2menu system is XML-based, and could be used in two ways (as I do in Bart):

• UI front-end for the build process
• UI front-end or shell for the mOS runtime

The MS WinPE build process would benefit greatly from some sort of GUI front end, and nu2menu would be useful for that. It runs as an unobtrusive button in one corner of the screen, and from there it fans out like the traditional Win9x Start menu, but with a lot more power and logic.