After the jump, more CD and DVD burning tools, including Movie Maker and ways to burn ISOs.

Microsoft offers a variety of free applications at Windows Live including Movie Maker. Movie Maker is a simple tool for creating movies and slideshows. You can combine video clips, photos, and audio files; Movie Maker includes a variety of transition effects, the ability to overlay text, and to adjust the lighting and contrast of videos. You can also burn completed movies to disc from within the program. You can click on the DVD icon on the ribbon or select Burn a DVD from the Save movie menu, as shown below.

Those are basic tasks though, what if you want to do more sophisticated things when burning discs like creating a bootable DVD or editing an ISO image that you downloaded? Winzip is able to open ISO image, you can use it to copy files from within an ISO image but it does not include features for creating or modifying them. UltraISO is designed to do exactly that. UltraISO is designed for creating, editing, and converting both bootable and non-bootable ISO images. One feature that I find particularly useful is the ability to burn and an ISO image to a USB drive, its very convenient to have a bootable USB drive with antimalware and troubleshooting tools. For example, you might want to burn the ISO image I describe in Creating a Custom DVD or CD for Eliminating Viruses and Spyware to a thumb drive that you carry around in case one of your less computer proficient relatives asks for help when you’re visiting. In Explorer, Right-click the ISO image and select Open with UltraISO. In the Local: pane in the lower right select the thumb drive, then open the Bootable menu and select Write Disk Image, as shown below. The Write Disk Image dialog box will appear, click Write to write the ISO image to the USB drive.

How to create a bootable disc? You could do it with Linux, but then you’d have to learn another OS, I prefer to stick with Windows. Besides, there are a lot of useful tools already available for Windows. You may have heard of the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE or simply PE) that has been available to computer vendors for years. Microsoft made it available to everyone a few years ago, and I’ve found it to be extremely useful. There are several ways to create a customized Windows PE disc, the simplest approach is to use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) that some colleagues of mine in the Solutions Accelerators Team (SAT) at Microsoft created. You’ll need several gigs of storage space to download and use everything described below, make sure you have enough room before you start!

1. Download and install MDT 2010, you can use the default values for the installation.
2. Download Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows 7 and burn the disc image to a DVD. Run StartCD.exe from the DVD to install the AIK on your computer. Once again, you can use the default values for the installation. This is a big file, if you have an MSDN subscription I suggest that you download it from there because the MSDN downloader can resume interrupted downloads from where they left off.
3. Download malware scanning tools and other utilities designed for offline use. There are a lot of free antimalware tools available, but for this troubleshooting disc you need those that will work in offline mode, I’ve been able to use Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, Alwil Software’s avast! Virus Cleaner, and McAfee AVERT Stinger with ease.
4. To create a Deployment Share in MDT
   1. Open Deployment Workbench from the Start Menu.
   2. In the console tree expand Deployment Workbench and right-click Deployment Shares.
   3. Select New Deployment Shares and specify a location for the deployment share such as C:\Deploymentshare.
   4. Accept the default values for the rest of the options and complete the wizard.
5. You’re ready to create the troubleshooting disc, to do so
   1. In the console tree expand Deployment Workbench and right-click Deployment Shares.
   2. Right-click the deployment share you created in the details pane and select Properties.
   3. Select the Windows PE x86 Settings tab and click Generate a Generic Windows PE WIM File.
   4. Enter an Image Description such as Offline Troubleshooting.
   5. Select Generate a generic bootable ISO image.
   6. Enter an ISO file name such as Troubleshooting_Disc.iso.
   7. Next to Extra Directory to Add enter the path to the folder where you saved the malware and troubleshooting tools in task 3.
   8. Set the scratch space size to: 128.
   9. Click on OK.
   10. Right click on the Deployment Share and choose Update Deployment Share.
   11. Click on Next two times, and then click Finish.
   12. Burn the iso image file to a CD-ROM or DVD, it will be located in a directory called Boot folder in the deployment share folder, e.g. c:\Deploymentshare\Boot folder\Troubleshooting_Disc.iso.

Your troubleshooting disc is ready to go, when you boot the stricken system the system drive is X:, and you’ll find your troubleshooting tools in the root of that drive.

This brief article has only brushed the surface of what’s available in MDT, if you have to manage more than a few PCs or if you have to install Windows frequently then you should look at what else it has to offer. MDT greatly simplifies the tasks involved in creating and maintaining installation images and deploying those images to different computers.

Kurt Dillard

kurtdillard.com

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