VistaPE is the innovative system for creating bootable disks of any kind and contains all the leading groundworks of its domain.

VistaPE is a system based on the kernel of the newest operating system Microsoft Windows Vista. VistaPE uses technology and largely resembles WinPE 2.0 at Microsoft, but has a graphical shell, expanded set of supported devices and functions, and can run almost any Windows program. VistaPE is meant to be a universal tool with the flexibility to grow with your needs. VistaPE can be loaded on regular or crashed systems and allows the user to get full access to all disks in order restoring data, checking for viruses, fixing system boot problems, transferring data onto a network or through the Internet.

Firstly VistaPE is to be used by administrators of various systems and helps them to resolve the problems of different operating systems. Owing to its flexibility and simplicity, the system is available almost to everyone as the universal professional assistant while resolving different problems.

In addition, here you can find a lot of useful information about the unassisted creating of bootable CDs, the transfer and cloning of operating systems and other information that can be useful for administrators.

VistaPE is a project (set of scripts) for WinBuilder, a scripting and built environment for creating bootable Windows based system. You are free to customize VistaPE in any way you want. All you need for creating your own VistaPE system is a licensed Microsoft Windows Vista installation disk (any edition), or the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which is freely available. Please note that some optional parts of VistaPE require files that are only included on the Vista installation media and not in WAIK. Those optional parts are not available when using WAIK as source for building VistaPE.

General functionality
1. Possibility to fully or partially loading VistaPE at startup into memory (boot.wim)
2. Support for a big number of SATA/RAID/SCSI/NIC drivers
3. Capable to read and write on NTFS/FAT32/FAT/Ext2/Ext3 partitions
4. Full networking support
5. Automatic hardware detection (PnP)
6. Booting from CD/HDD/UFD/Network
7. Compatibility with Microsoft Windows Vista
8. A wide range of programs and shells (Explorer, LiteStep, BS Explorer ...)
9. No limits regarding the maximum number of open processes
10. Automatic creation shortcuts for programs
11. Ability to remove VistaPE boot media while VistaPE is running (using boot.wim)
12. Full multilanguage support

Assemblage VistaPE is possible under Windows XP/2003 x86/x64 any editions, it is recommended to place a directory with WinBuilder in a root of disk C: on NTFS (on FAT16/32 assemblage is not possible), during project build it is required around 2Gb of free disk space, also you should have administration privileges on your computer. For assemblage under Windows Vista you, most likely, need to disable UAC (User Account Control).

It is recommended to test VistaPE in VirtualBox, VirtualPC or VMWare before you use it.

Important building steps
1.Download the latest version of VistaPE project and start "winbuilder.exe";
2.Open "Paths" tab in WinBuilder and browse to the folder with Windows Vista or WAIK files (Source directory);
3.Click on the "Play" button to start Building "VistaPE".

System requirements
1.You need a Microsoft Windows Vista DVD or an installed Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) for creating working VistaPE. In case the Vista DVD is used as source we recommend that you copy the content of DVD disk to your hard drive. This will significantyl speed up WinBuilder's built process. If WAIK is used as source for building VistaPE only basic functionality will be available.
2.VistaPE runs with at least 256Mb of RAM (though we recommend 512Mb)
3.About 2Gb of free space on hard disk will be needed during creating process.
4.While building on x64 machine, you have to have WAIK installed.

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this boot cd software.