Now you have one more reason to love XP — It’s portable, bootable LIVE from USB drive.
The idea of XP LIVE USB is interesting and infact very easy provided you follow the instructions below –
The good thing about this method is, you don’t need hefty 700mb XP installer, its pretty small -54MB
Download here and proceed with instructions:
Step 1. Un-Rar the file and you will get 7 extracted files. The first 2 files are the manual in Germany & Russian language. You might not found the English documentation because bartPE seems developed by a Germany. First of all, we need to provide a USB stick with minimal size of 256MB. Incase you are wondering what the heck is BartPE- It’s a utility using which this image is built. The process of creating BartPE image is complex, and I’m not discussing about it here.
Step 2. Then, make a fresh quick format with hpusbfw.exe tool included in the packages. Format using this utility with the settings shown in the image below.
Step 3. After the format is done, Copy all the files from a folder on USB stick. Reboot the system & make sure that you enable the USB boot giving USB higher precedence in BIOS settings – while the USB memory is still plugged in. Let the computer boot from it. The boot process speed depends upon your USB storage speed. It was pretty decent for me.
Step 4. There’s no step 4, when you boot into windows, You are done. 🙂
The default desktop background is covered by dark bartPE pictures. In the left corner are showing up a “Go” button — representing a Start button in a real Windows. Click on it, it will raise a list of simple menu pointing to the default applications such as Windows Wordpad, the Calculator program, Paint image editor & a file manager called A43 replacing the Windows Explorer instead.
Note that this USB live also equipped with the fully functionality of command prompt. It’s DOS is actually same as the one from a real Windows XP.
Look at the picture below, “About” link from Paint program
It shows you exact same About page as the one you might found in a real Windows XP. However, it is in Germany. Don’t worry about that. Anyway, you don’t even want to read it.
It has great advantages, eg: portability, In emergency-to rescue the system,etc. it’s NOT legally allowed to do so, do it at your own risk.
Happy Portability!