FalconFour's Micro Boot CD 2.5 - Live XP, Spinrite, Kon-Boot

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F A L C O N F O U R P R O U D L Y P R E S E N T S |

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T I T L E | FalconFour's Micro Boot CD v2.5 | D A T E | Feb 18, 2010 |

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D E S C R I P T I O N |

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A little preview of what's to come.



Possibly the most powerful 50mb you will ever download. On this disc is a bootable

Windows XP installation containing many useful tools for PC diagnostics and

repair... or anything else you want to use it for. Live XP based on Hiren's XP 10.1

gives you a working copy of Windows on any bootable PC, even without a hard drive.

From there you can edit the PC's registry offline, run an offline Chkdsk, or run a

quick offline temp file cleanup with CleanExternal. All sorts of cool offline stuff

here.



But 50mb gave me a little more room to work with. So I added a few DOS-based

utilities as well, like Spinrite to refresh/repair a hard drive, PTEdit to reveal if

your old system is 48-bit LBA compatible (137gb barrier on old IDE systems), and

Kon-Boot to log in to any local account without a password - and without breaking

the existing one. Pretty powerful stuff.



Suck on that, Damn Small Linux.



How'd this all start? Well, I had created a MiniBootCD of the v2.5 F4UBCD to fit on

an 8cm 185mb CD-R (we had a lot of 'em laying around), and those became the de-facto

shop standard. Then, I was browsing around and I saw a business-card CD-R that held

50mb. Well, 50mb was about the size of the raw XP image. Why not try cramming it in

there? Cram, I did. But in making it fit, I found some extra free space laying

around. And I found that I could apply those techniques to other parts of the system

as well. Next thing I knew, I was thinking of all the useful tools I could cram onto

the disc. Instead of wasting space with flat floppy images, they're now cleared and

GZipped, decompressed on startup with memdisk. And it worked well.



Now you can see what's in store for v2.5 ahead of time. Since this isn't actually

being used officially in shop I can give it to you guys for your consumption.

Hopefully it'll make up for the relatively unpolished v2.0 (by current standards)!



Once you dive into this disc, you'll never need another boot CD. (tm)



Notes:



Compression of the ISO isn't necessary... everything is so tightly packed, 7z'ing it

would only save about 1mb, tops. Better to make it more convenient to use.



The RAM image fills up fast after booting since it doesn't support file compression

like NTFS does. So if you use network support, make sure you do it last, as you'll

be likely to have 0 bytes free after starting it. Clear the *.pnf files from

X:/i386/inf to free some space if needed.



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O N T H E D I S C |

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Live XP based on Hiren's XP 10.1

Includes: HD Tune Pro 4.01, RegEditPE v2.0 Beta, Ghost 11.5, fix_hdc, network

support, Keyfinder, NTPWEdit, RemoveWGA, Unstoppable Copier, 7-Zip, and Solitaire

Tweaks: Desktop icons, Taskmgr as task manager, 1024x768 res, 7-zip instead of UHA

compression, FAT32 image filesystem to save space, various other tweaks

SpinRite 6.0

PTEdit

Memtest86+ 4.0

Kon-Boot 1.1