What is Reddit's opinion of AOMEI PE Builder?

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WinPE is really the way to go for tech tools. Try out Aomei PE Builder. Fresh out of beta as of a few days ago, super simple and takes all the guesswork & manual tinkering out of creating a WinPE environment. Just create a bootable USB using any external HDD/SSD/flash drive, and that will give you pretty much what you're wanting.

http://www.aomeitech.com/pe-builder.html

I use this to do pretty much exactly what you're wanting to do. I have a 120GB SSD with WinPE5.0 built by Aomei PE Builder. It includes Backupper, Partition Manager, and 4 sysprep'd images to deploy to new systems for my clients. So I plug up & boot this one drive, restore an image, and reboot. Easy peasy.

The only catch is that for some reason, it only works with Win7 and Win8 right now.. Giving you WinPE 3.1 or WinPE 5.0, respectively. Aomei PE Builder won't run on Win8.1, which would have given you WinPE5.1 bootable media. Last month, the beta ran on Win8.1 but the media didn't work on anything you tried to boot with it. So I see why they blocked it for the first non-beta release, but I'm also curious as to why it left beta if 8.1 is still problematic.

Now for a full Windows OS on an external drive, there's Windows To Go. Main issue here is that A) It's only available in Win8.x Enterprise, and B) you need proper licensing for the OS.

Even with the workarounds that lets you do Windows To Go-type external Windows volumes without the Enterprise SKU, you still have to worry about licensing if you're wanting a "portable" full blown install of Windows to carry around. But if anyone wants to tinker with it anyway, Aomei Partition Manager has a Windows To Go builder.

Are you sure that the drive you pulled is the only drive? When a laptop touts a "hybrid drive", it can mean one of two things:

A) 1 single hybrid HDD(mechanical disk w/ onboard NAND cache)

or

B) 2 separate drives running in a faux-RAID0 setup thanks to Intel RST... One drive being a mini PCIe SSD, then other being a separate mechanical drive. Neither single drive will have 100% of your data.

Given what you've described, are you sure your setup is the former and not the latter?

Here's what I'd do if I were you:

1) Put the drive back in the laptop

2) On another machine, create your own bootable WinPE environment: http://www.aomeitech.com/pe-builder.html It would be best if you can create this on a Win8.1 or Win10 machine so you can be certain that your bootable PE media has whatever Intel RST/RAID driver for your laptop's SATA controller, if in fact it is that hybrid HDD/SDD setup.

3) Boot the PE media on the laptop.

4) Browse for files on the questionable drive this way.

Aomei products. What sets them apart from some of the other free tools:

1) Free for commercial use (I see Macrium & Easeus in this thread, but you're technically supposed to pay for that if it's not personal use. Given that this is /r/computertechs, I feel this is very important)

2) Clean easy UI (ahem, looking at you, Clonezilla)

3) Bootable media can be built on WinPE.. Meaning if you make you media with Backupper that's installed on Windows 8.1 x64, you get all those drivers for USB 3.0, touchscreens, SATA/RAID controllers in the base WIM, plus UEFI support if need be.

Backupper--for imaging/cloning

Partition Manager

PE Builder

> ith the popularity of Win8 and Win10 using GPT with UEFI enabled PC's I've been finding it difficult to support PC using WinPE

Why not roll up your own that supports both legacy and UEFI boot options? There's products like Aomei PE Builder that simplifies the process down to like 4 clicks, no fussing with the Windows ADK. And unlike most things out there, the free version is actually licensed for commercial use.

http://www.aomeitech.com/pe-builder.html

Wait, why not? The Windows executable for Get Data Back can be run from a WinPE environment. WinPE2.0(Vista codebase) and higher support GPT disks. The LiveCD that they pre-package and distribute uses an old version of Knoppix, not sure how nicely, if at all, it plays with GPT disks.

https://www.runtime.org/peb.htm

Just roll up a PE environment based off Win7(PE3.x) or 8.1(PE5.x) 32-bit and you're gold. (64-bit PE won't include WOW64, thus won't run 32-bit programs that you bring along)

You can do it the official way: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ff793507%28v=winembedded.60%29.aspx

..or the super duper easy 3-click way with Aomei PE Builder: http://www.aomeitech.com/pe-builder.html Just set up a side machine with Win8.1 32-bit, install Aomei PE, and create your bootable media.

Ah, I've just the solution for you because I did this for myself:

Build your own PE environment with Aomei PE Builder. Once you're done, drop the portable versions of WinDLG and Seatools anywhere on the drive. Or extract all of the HBCD tools from Hirens. Or just run them from another flash drive. Or slip the files in while creating the PE media. Whatever floats your boat.

http://www.aomeitech.com/pe-builder.html

Obviously you need to build this on a 32-bit OS, because the 64-bit PE environment won't include WOW64 and can't run 32-bit apps.

The catch is that for now, it only works on Vista/7/8, not 8.1. Fire up Win8 x86 on a spare machine to make yourself some media. (Or spin up a VM)