This is Project 1 of 3 for alternative WinFE builds. The two other projects are forthcoming with the primary difference being you being able to choose which method you prefer.
This build is tentatively called “Mini – WinFE” because it is a super quick method to build a WinFE with minimal features. Primarily, it is an acquisition boot disc with the FAU utilities and FTK Imager available for you to add (no cost for these apps online). It is also set up for X-Ways Forensics (of course I want X-Ways on it…) if you have XWF. You will notice that there is not an option to select the Write Protection app (by Colin Ramsden) to make this a WinFE. That is because you don’t have a choice. This project only builds a WinFE and not a PE, eliminating any mistake in your build. It’d be a ‘bad thing’ to think you were using WinFE when you actually missed a step and were using a “P”E.
From start to finish, you can have your WinFE.iso completed in about 3 or 4 minutes. From there, you can either put the ISO on a CD or USB. Creating a bootable USB or CD adds about 5 minutes. So, in less than 10 minutes, you have your very own WinFE bootable CD/USB.
Although this is ‘beta’, it is beta only because we’d like to get it tested a little more by others. We’ve beat it up a bit without problems. After a few beta volunteers get done testing it, this WinFE will be released to everyone. Then off to the other two WinFE build projects. By the way, I am only a conduit of these builds as others (to be credited) are actually doing all the heavy lifting.
Personally, this is a build method I really like because it is fast to build, fast to boot, and fast to run. It does not have all the bells and whistles of a more fully WinFE build, but if you just need an imaging disk, this is a great way to go.
Contact me if you want to be a beta tester and I’ll send the login creds to download the project.
And really, if you haven’t built a WinFE yet, it doesn’t get much easier than this, or faster. If you teach how to build a WinFE in training, everything you did before has just been negated with this build method insofar as time involved to teach and use. In less than 10 minutes, your class has a bootable forensic operating system. How cool is that?
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