How To Create Your Own Windows XP Live CD

How To Create Your Own Windows XP Live CD

By following this guide you can now create a CD that runs Win XP without being installed, and use it to troubleshoot and recover crashed machines.

A live CD contains an OS configured to run directly off the CD, ie, it need not be installed on the system. Just pop the CD into the system's drive, boot from it and the OS will be up and running, without tampering with the OS loaded on your system's hard drive. This can be a very handy tool for network administrators for tasks such as, recovering data from crashed desktops or doing other troubleshooting tasks. Most live CDs till now had been based on Linux, with the most popular one being Knoppix. But, now there's a live CD that runs Win XP.


What You Need :-

  • A Windows XP SP2 install CD

Next, it will give you a plug-in list from where you need to select programs that you want to put on the live
CD. There are some very useful programs for system recovery, such as Nero for burning CDs, Ghost,
Snapshot, DOS 16-bit support and Easy Recovery Pro.

Besides the default plug-ins that come with PE-Builder, you can also download your own from here:


Finally, after you’ve chosen all the plug-ins, you’re ready to create an ISO image of your live Win XP CD.
Click on Next, and you’ll be asked to provide a path where the program will dump all files temporarily.
Tick the ‘Create ISO Image’ option and give the path and ISO file name to be created. It will start creating
the content for the live CD in the output folder. If the content is created successfully, it will also
automatically create an ISO image. Now you just have to use any burning software such as Nero and burn
the image on a CD.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi! I am very interested in creating such a useful tool, but the mediafire link is no longer valid (there is no file there anymore). Can you repost that - thank you!

Anonymous said...

WELL I have some Questions too. How can i customize the settings for Live CD? For exemple: how can i choose to boot the live CD wit my choosen preferences like Theme, Apperence, Colors, Effects or rezolution of desktop, to eliminate wasted time with customizing the system at every boot from CD.