Spybot Christmas Presents, Part 1: Bootable CD

[PepiMK]

Please note: This tool will be part of Spybot-S&D 2.0 Professional Edition and of commercial variants of Spybot-S&D 2.0. It is no longer available as a separate download.

Disclaimer: this is a beta - work in progress (means feedback is quite welcome)! The tool creates a bootable and usable CD, but the CD is quite bare currently, no runtime optimization etc.. Also, a 1 GB (yepp, that's right, 992 MB to be exact) requires a broadband connection. That said, let's get some description...

Some malware can best be removed if the infected system, including the malware itself, is not active during the cleaning. To use another system, one needs either a second full installation, or a operating system bootable from CD.

There are existing solutions to create bootable Windows CDs that include Spybot-S&D, including the well-known BartPE environment (this is not intended as competition to it). The BartPE solution has the disadvantage that the user needs to own a full Windows XP CD though (no recovery CD or partition only, and Win9x/ME CDs are not sufficient either), and some understanding of the process to create the CD.

The goal of this tool is to create a bootable CD with a minimum of interaction by the user required; our method skips or automates the difficult parts and tries to be as simple as possible using these steps nearly every user should be capable of (*):

• Download a DVD image from Microsoft (Windows Automated Installation Kit).
• Burn that DVD image to a real DVD
• Install the software from that DVD
• Run our tool to create an ISO file of a bootable CD
• Burn that ISO file to a real CD
• Boot from that CD and use Spybot-S&D

(*) The only downside to this solution is that the user needs to download a Microsoft file of 1 GB, which needs broadband access.

So your requirements would be:

• DVD burner (or CD burner if you extract the DVD image and install from the extracted files)
• Empty DVD (if you don't have one, you can install from an extracted version of the image)
• Empty CD (unless you only want to test the created image in VMWare)
• Broadband connection (or any other way to get the Windows Automated Installation Kit DVD)

And to create the CD, Microsoft specifies the following OS as a requirement:

• Windows Server 2003 SP1; Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista
• Windows XP SP2 with KB926044
• Windows Server 2003 SP1 with KB926044
• Windows Server 2003 SP2
• Windows Vista family

Download: No longer available.

And of course some screenshots:

Wizard page 1, prerequisites:



Wizard page 2, application selection:



Wizard page 3: ready to start:



Wizard page 3, again: CD image was created: