Hello All,
Good day.
Having a USB Disk with all the necessary Portable Apps is cool and very handy. But it lacks something.
I was wondering if anybody has successfully iinstalled a Windows XP embedded with all our beloved portable applications still working. This setup I believe would certainly make our USB drives independent from the main OS of a PC.
Any advice or tips that would shed light to this would be very much appreciated.
Thanks All 
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Go here:
http://ubcd4win.com/
This project allows you to burn a Live CD (Win PE-based) compiled from your own Win XP or greater install CD. There is a way(?s) to burn it onto a USB stick and be able to have it boot from that, although I haven't tried this.
Nonetheless, it sounds very promising, and mayhaps one day I will get around to trying it out on a USB stick. As is, I'm pretty satisfied w/ my UBCD4W CD, except that I can't figger out how to make a plug-in for my modem drivers (yup, I'm still a "dial-up dinosaur"). Even so, it gets web access pretty good (no configuring needed) when I use it on a PC with network and/or broadband hardware.
(My current CD weighs in at ~500 MB; my previous one made with a previous version of the project, weighed in at ~375 Mb).
Bon appetit!...
P.S. - as an aside, I can also tell you that I've accessed and used my USB stick and its portable apps under a UBCD4W-powered system, and they work just fine.
I have noticed, however, that it sometimes has problems "seeing" my USB stick unless I had it plugged in already at boot-time .
"I don't hate cats...as long as they stay on the freeway, where they belong."
- Brad Stine
BartPE, which UBCD is based on and WinBuilder
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WinBuilder uses not one but several projects with portability in mind.
We've learnt over time to create fast and smallest sized boot disks based on XP/2003/Vista and ReactOS.
For portable apps I would recommend using LiveXP - it will use the explorer as shell, recognize USB sticks even when plugged while running the OS and is sized on 61Mb already bundled with a few usefull freeware applications inside like driveimageXML, Offbyone web browser, a cd-writer app, SATA drivers and network support.
Everything step in the build process is scriptable and can be rewritten easily.
There also other excellent project worth trying like:
NativeEX barebone (31Mb boot disk with explorer and network support)
NativePE (full support for RAM/SDI booting)
VistaPE (based on the VistaDVD or free WAIK from MS ~200Mb)
PicoXP (xp based 14Mb with support for cmd.exe and ntfs drives)
All of these can be downloaded straight from winbuilder - wich is an 800Kb exe that needs no install and will keep all settings inside an ini file like portable apps should.
Here's a direct link to the latest beta application (should be labeled as stable soon), just download, unpack and get the projects you wish to try. Don't forget to download a folder called tools - it's a common folder that contains a small but helpfull set of free tools like upx, qemu and ISO burner.
http://boot-land.net/winbuilder/temp/WinBuilder.zip
If the portable apps community is interested, a custom wb project can quickly be designed adding support for popular portable apps, just let us know in our development forums:
http://boot-land.net/forums
I tryed and succeeded with installing winXP on a portable instance of QEmu.
with kqemu its fast enough too, but kqemu needs a tiny 1sec installation. So i
had this installer in a batch-file together with all other parameters and it worked.
The only cause i dont use it is, that iNet-access wasnt possible. and it'll stay impossible on portable emulations without admin rights.
the only way doing what you want to do would be to boot the pc from your stick. and if the pc isnt usb-bootable you could use a boot-cd which initializes some usb-drivers to boot from usb
inoX
Web access is *not* impossible with an embedded XP:
I use my UBCD4W on a workplace PC all the time, and it gets on the web transparently - no need to even configure any network connexions.
The prob I'm having is getting it to work on my home PC, cuz I have a dialup modem, and UBCD4W don't natively include the drivers for my modem.
Now, as to getting web ax-s (w/o Admin rights) on an embedded XP
- *other than* UBCW4W,
- and/or on a *USB stick*,
- and/or running said XP under *QEMU/KQEMU*,
well, YMMV (your mileage may vary)....
...Just thought I should clarify for folks that these various embedded PE-based flavors CAN (at least in *some* cases, when running off a *CD*, and *NOT* involving any iteration of QEMU) potentially get on the web, no prob...
"I don't hate cats...as long as they stay on the freeway, where they belong."
- Brad Stine