You are more than welcome. It’s comments like yours that make writing this blog worthwhile.

Best wishes, and happy new year!

–Ed–

I went to the trouble of registering just to say thanks!
I spent the last three days learning teaching myself WinPE 2.0
and like you I wanted an Windows Explorer and after surfing I found the
program A43 which I added to WinPE so I could browse and save files
if catastrophe struck. Well I succeeded and was now about to try and write a script file to load the browser automatically, when I landed at your blog, and man am I glad I did.
VistaPE looks like a candy store to me.

Thanks for taking time to tell us about it, and have a Happy New Year.

Bill Skiles in NC

– Berlodo –

Just a note to say I got started with VistaPE. Successfully built the *.iso and got it to boot under MS Virtual PC 2007. Very impressive ! It’s amazing that it included a Web Browser, Opera — I can see that this will be very useful in an I.T. Support environment e.g. when a user’s hard disk won’t boot you could have VistaPE on a bootable USB stick to get emergency access to their data on hard disk (if it’s readable) and copy it off to a network share or USB hard disk, while giving them emergency web access, via Opera, to corporate Intranet and Webmail.

Looks like my earlier alert from AVG is a false positive …. this is explained on the Forum with a workaround, see :
[A href="http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=7130"]

I am aiming to get it working via PXE eventually so that it could be booted across the network ( we have an old version of 3Com Boot Services and I got vanilla WinPE booting from this … after a lot of hair pulling, but that’s another story ..)

Thanks again.
– Berlodo –

You are more than welcome. I’m so glad to interact with folks who actually “read” my blog, that I’ll bend over backwards to try to help in any way I can. The guys at WinBuilder/Bootland/VistaPE are really great, with a maximum of functionality and responsiveness and absolutely no BS whatsoever. Given their example, how could I do otherwise?

Thanks again, and take care,

–Ed–

Thanks for your very prompt reply … it’s great to hear that the site admins are fixing this issue .(thanks to your intervention)… I’m gonna give it another day or two for everything to settle down before trying to download it again and will report back here when successful.

It sure looks like a brilliant project — I hope my previous post hasn’t put other potential users off,

– Berlodo –
(kudos to Ed for discovering this tool and spreading the news)

My apologies for your troubles. According to the principals at Boot-land and VistaPE their sites got compromised last week (after I wrote my blog about the sites, I can’t help but also observe) and indeed some of their downloads became infected. They’re working like mad right now to clean everything up. In the meantime, they recommend that you download the full project from this link http://winbuilder.net/download.php?view.37. Nuno Brito, the creator of WinBuilder, says that some scans may be triggered for this file because it contains several AV packages, some of which include virus signatures (which of course can be interpreted as the real thing, rather than a sign of the real thing). Here’s the analysis of the file from Virus Total an online virus scanning service: http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/132612c12ea9baece1b0788da7bcff80. It finds two suspicious elements, both of which occur inside AV packages (eSafe and VBA32).

I’ve downloaded and scanned this file with Norton, Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus, and F-Secure, none of which find anything malicious. I’ve used this software repeatedly on five different Vista machines for the past couple of months, and none of my various malware packages has ever registered a complaint.

–Ed–

This VistaPE looks like a great project BUT …. some of the files from the download site are infected with Worm/Trojans … I downloaded WinBuilder twice today ( 11 march 2009 ) once at work, once at home — the first download (at work) only saved a small file and I was suspicious (surely lt would need to be MBs in size and this was only a few 100′s K) but, still I ran it after extracting from archive — it was Virus infected — i tried a second time and it downloaded a much bigger file — this now seemed legit — but the original Virus alert scared me off.
later, at home, I downloaded a different earlier version of the Builder (full size, this time) and all seemed ok until I ran the tool for first time and it failed with a Virus alert while building the *.iso
– alert (AVG Free) says : WormAutoIt.FCX