Operating System

Because the Active@ Boot Disk ISO image has been created using the Microsoft Windows PE (Pre-installation Environment) 10 operating system, you have access to many new Windows 10 (ver. 6.3, build 18362) features.

The bootable image contains a variety of plug-ins, drivers and other 64-bit applications.

Here are some features of Windows PE:

  • You can use the new Windows 10 style standard dialogs, like File Open, Save As, and so on.
  • PnP (Plug and Play) support: Hardware devices can be detected and installed while Windows PE is running. This supports any in-box PnP device, including removable media and mass-storage devices. It means that you can plug in a mass-storage device to use for data recovery or data backup.
  • Automatic writable RAM volume: When booting from the CD/DVD drive, Windows PE automatically creates a writable RAM disk (drive X:) and allocates 512 MB of the RAM disk for general-purpose storage. By using compressed NTFS, the 512 MB is addressable up to almost 1 GB. This drive space may be used to recover files or folders.
Note: There are two Active@ Boot Disk packages being distributed. One is a public evaluation DEMO that can be also activated with a registration key. DEMO package contains a standard WinPE 10 set of packages. This is a minimal size configuration. Another package has been supplied to clients after purchasing a registration key. This full package contains additional packages installed: WinPE-NetFX (.NET Framework version 4.5), WinPE-Dot3Svc (IEEE 802.X authentication protocol on wired networks), WinPE-RNDIS (network support for devices that implement the Remote NDIS specification over USB), WinPE-PowerShell (PowerShell console), WinPE-StorageWMI (PowerShell cmd lets for storage management), WinPE-Scripting (multiple-language scripting environment for automating system administration tasks, such as batch file processing), WinPE-WMI (subset of the Windows Management Instrumentation providers that enable minimal system diagnostics), WinPE-Secure Startup (provisioning and management of BitLocker and the Trusted Platform Module - TPM), WinPE-Enhanced Storage (enables Windows to discover additional functionality for storage devices, such as encrypted drives, and implementations that combine Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and IEEE 1667). It requires ~150MB more disk storage space and consumes ~150MB more RAM when boot up than the smaller package.
Important: After the Windows PE operating system and Active@ Boot Disk have started, the boot CD/DVD/USB can be removed from the drive. A new CD/DVD can be inserted into the drive and you can read from it or burn data to it.