USB and Custom Boot Disks

Audience: Tech Staff
Technical Level: Medium

Each year, during the start of the new academic year we will have a new incoming class of law students (150 – 250) zooming by with newer and more complex computer problems. They can come in the form of a virus, trojan, worm, or spyware. Have you ever received the ever popular blue screen of death with a message informing you that Windows registry hive is missing or corrupted?

Working with limited staff, time and resources, what is your best option for fixing student laptop issues, installing software and running computer maintenance. The answer is to streamline the process and to automate the procedure.

In this session, we will discuss how to create the ultimate rescue CD that allows you to streamline the computer repair, maintenance, setup, and application installation process. We will focus our discussion on the two wonderful technology innovations: BartPE and AutoIt.

BartPE, Bart’s Preinstalled Environment is a bootable live Windows CD/DVD. BartPE supports various types of hardware and can be configured to use a variety of plug-ins to add applications, drivers or tools. For example, you can add the Firefox plug-in to make the browser available on the CD. When we build our BartPE CD’s we add the Windows XPE plug-in allowing BartPE to emulate the Windows XP environment, making it BartXPE.

AutoIt is a freeware BASIC-like language for automating Windows GUI and general purpose scripting. The two applications working in tandem can automate most of your end-user support tasks. For example you can automate applications and utilities to run automatically while under the BartXPE environment. Allowing you to boot off the CD and just walk away while AutoIt runs the utilities you automated.

* Additional materials including those from CALI conference can be found at http://law.asu.edu/it/bartpe

MP3: ChuLR3Sat900.mp3

Play It Now!

Wayne Chu
Technology Support Analyst Associate
Arizona State University College of Law
Wayne dot Chu at asu dot edu

Edward Garcia
Technology Support Analyst Sr
Arizona State University College of Law
Edward dot Garcia at asu dot edu

About Elmer Masters

Elmer R. Masters is the Director of Technology at the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (www.cali.org) where he works on interesting projects involving technology and legal education like eLangdell, Classcaster, Lawbooks, QuizWright, and the CALI website. He has over 30 years of experience building tech tools for legal education and systems for accessing law and legal materials on the Internet. He is the admin of the Teknoids mailing list (www.teknoids.net) and has been blogging about legal education, law, and technology for over 20 years (www.symphora.com). He has a JD from Syracuse University College of Law and was employed by Syracuse, Cornell Law School, and Emory University School of Law before joining CALI in 2003. Elmer has presented at the CALI Conference for Law School Computing (where he organizes the program), the AALL and AALS Annual Meetings, Law Via The Internet, and other conferences, symposia, and workshops on topics ranging from IT management in law schools to building open access court reporting systems to information architecture design and implementation in law.
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