Unfortunately there are so few updates nowadays to WinFE, that this blog is woefully neglected…on a positive note, since WinFE practically needs no updates, there is hardly a need to keep up on WinFE once you have mastered building it.
The best and most current source of all-things-WinFE is from a free online course at http://courses.dfiro...sic-environment so other than taking the course, this blog will not have additional information building WinFE.
The course includes downloads and links to downloads to build every publicly known version and build type of WinFE, from the basic WinFE, WinFE Lite, WTE WinFE, Mini-WinFE, and WinBuilder WinFE.
The WinFE wordpress blog will be used only for sporadic WinFE updates and related information since WinFE has practically reached the best it can be at current software standards (Windows 8). The only posts that may be original from here on out would be case examples, but that quickly grows old (I booted a machine to WinFE and imaged it…). A few instances are very neat, like imaging a Surface Pro, and for those interesting cases, I’ll post them as I come across them or am sent information about them.
At its foundation, WinFE is a strong forensic OS platform, built on the latest Windows operating system, which can run most types of forensic software. That’s about it. Simple, but amazingly effective at a forensic boot platform. Since it is so very simple, the updates to the WinFE blog become less and less. Therefore, the free webinar course covers everything you need to learn about WinFE along with every download needed, plus tips on building, using, and testifying to the use of WinFE.
After you view the course and build a few WinFEs, you’ll see that WinFE is only a forensic boot OS. But you will also see that because it is a Windows boot OS, you can do so many things with it that you can not do with a Linux forensic OS or with a hardware writeblocker. That is the beauty of WinFE. Simple. Ingenious. Hard to improve upon (at this point…).
You have my permission to use the WinFE course and its materials in a manner that benefits WinFE at no cost. That means you can use information from the course to teach WinFE at conferences or any training session. WinFE is free (technically, you need a Windows OS license…but otherwise its free), and I’ve made the course free as well. When teaching or writing about WinFE related to the source and you choose to attribute to the source, that’s nice of you, but not necessary if you don’t want.
Take a run at the WinFE course. Watch all the videos or only the videos of interest. They are broken down by build types and how-to videos. The most important benefit you can get out of the course (other than learning how to build/use WInFE) is getting some formalized training in front of you about WinFE. It’s one thing to spend hours (days?) figuring out something but quite another when you can get the meat-and-potatoes of what you need to know in the shortest period of time. I’d reckon that even if you attend a presentation on WinFE, you will get so much more out of the online course that you won’t regret the time spent.
I’ve also said a few times, that once you build and use a WinFE, you will regret not having done so years earlier. Don’t forget, WinFE has been around since 2008…it works even better now than back then.
