Bootable Live Windows CD/DVD (BartPE)

I have been using Live CD's for various repair and recovery tasks for some time. In the old days, we would build custom DOS floppy disks to install, repair and recover our PC's. As network and other such drivers grew in size, it became increasingly difficult to squeeze in the needed tools. I remember having to make the most difficult choice between a edit.exe and a network driver, fearing the days of using edlin, or even worse "copy con" to create/edit config files. Ahem... now that I have thoroughly dated myself, I will get on to the point. When DOS went away (I mean really went away, NT not Win9x which we all know was still DOS with a new face), it became all but impossible to boot into a windows environment to repair/recover windows. Linux Live CD's have filled the gap, offering several powerful tools. I needed to resize a partition for a new os install, and didn't have access to Partition Magic, a dynamic partition manipulation tool who's original purpose was making room on Windows PC's for OS/2. I found SystemRescueCD, which has a completely free graphical parititioning tool named QTParted. A couple months ago, I had used a small 50MB Linux Live CD named austrumi to reset a lost administrator password on a Windows 2000 machine. Worked like a charm. Recently, however, I ran into another password recovery situation where austrumi wouldn't work. It probably could have with some work, but would have required some customization because the machine was configured with psueduo hardware raid 0 (High Point controller). I found out that High Point controllers are not really hardware raid in the true sense, they are bios assist, and do not present a single drive to the operating system. A driver is required for the operating to properly see the logical drive. Thanks to my friend, jeffgus, I found an amazingly useful tool. A Windows Live CD creator, named BartPE. The reason why Windows Live CD's have not existed is because it would be illigal to distribute windows software. Microsoft has a solution they call Windows Preinstallation Environment (Win PE), and some OEM vendors have licensed similar technology. The author of BartPE got around the problem by requiring the user to supply a licensed copy of windows and generating the Live CD themself. The added benefit is a build environment allowing customization of the environment through plugins, so that specific hardware drivers and or utility software could be added to the image. The end result is a copy of Windows 2K/XP/2003 that will run completely off a CD/DVD. Add the High Point driver and I should be able to gain access to the elusive raid volume, find the SAM and do the necessary dirty work. BartPE can be built with plenty of useful utilities such as TightVNC, Putty, Remote Desktop and many more. Anyway, it was a great find, so I thought I would pass it along.