The ISO can be burned with any conventional CD/DVD writing program, like Nero, Easy CD Creator, CDRECORD, etc. Actually, HAWKPE has burning software on the disc, but you have to make the 1st CD to get it :-^ BTW, if you want to remaster this guy, feel free to get a copy of UltraISO (or something comparable) and knock yourself out. Later in this document, you'll find some remastering suggestions. The boot loader used with this edition of HAWKPE is an unmodified verion of ISOLINUX (3.61).

Let's say you've burned HAWKPE to CD/DVD, you're supposed to restart the PC with the HAWKPE disc in the CD/DVD drive, first modifying the BIOS setup to change the Boot order. Every PC made in the last seven years will boot from CD/DVD, but you might have to change the order of boot devices, so that the CD/DVD is at the top of the list of boot devices (it *MUST* precede the hard drive.) Those instructions are *WAY* beyond the scope of this README. If you've gotten this far, you probably can make the change in your sleep. Otherwise, put on your thinking cap and get to work !

If all has gone well and you do boot from your new HAWKPE disc, you're supposed to see a nice graphical splash screen with straight-forward menu, which can be navigated by pressing the 'hotkey' (the special colored key) for the menu item. Of course, you can also navigate using the up/down curose keys. If you don't do anything (ie. if the forty-five sec timeout expires w/o any keystrokes) or if you simply hit Enter, the system will boot BartPE. The following paragraphs describe the contents of the current menu:

Changes to HAWKPE-40 from HAWKPE-39:

* Updated BartPE/WinPE w/ the 27-Mar-08 McAfee, AdAware, ClamWin, and Spyware Doctor defs. Also had to update ClamWin itself to 0.92.
* Added the BTS Mass Storage Driver pack to BartPE/WinPE, for better hard drive media compatibility. My hope is that it has minimal SATA support. Unfortunately I don't have the hware resources I used to have when I started HAWKPE, hence I don't play w/ drivers that much anymore. So far, so good on the systems I've tried it on WRT SATA support, but it's hit-or-miss when it comes to RAID support ....
* Removed A43 File Explorer & VNC Neighborhood from BartPE, to make more room more useful things.
* Added TestDisk and PhotoRec to the Kitchen Sink DOS floppy image/menu pick from the CD'S main menu, for additional hdrive data recovery capabilities, from a HAWKPE user request. Not very familiar with these, but I had heard of them prior to their inclusion and they cost so little w/ so much capability: what the hell....
* Added Microscope 2005 B21/V14 & NSSI, the DOS-based diagnostic utils. NSSI is good for simply identifying PC hardware w/o the trouble of booting BartPE or Slax, whereas Microscope 2005 is a full-fledged PC diagnostic. I added Microscope primarily for USB-Scope, for checking out USB root hubs, etc.
BTW, NSSI will warn that a virus may be infecting your PC. This is due to the program being launched via MEMDISK, so that certain low-memory vectors have commandeered by MEMDISK. That is, MEMDISK is emulating a floppy on behalf of the program. THERE IS NO VIRUS PRESENT, SO DON'T BUG ME ABOUT THIS !!!!
* Updated a2-HijackFree (under BartPE/WinPE) to 3.0.0.382. A good program became a much better program since its addition to HAWKPE.
* Updated SmartDriverBackup to 2.02.
* Updated the IBM/Hitachi DFT (Drive Fitness Test) util on the CD menu to 4.11 (from Oct '07).
* Updated MemTest+ to 2.0 (discovered an even later version was available at the time of this writing, but didn't have the time to add it to the image before release) and MemTest86 to 3.4a (27-Dec-07). Just wanted more up-to-date utils on the disc.
* Updated Firefox (under Slax) to 2.0.0.13 and K3B to 1.0.4 and unfortunately had to remove WINE and the MPlayer-win32 codecs modules, to make room for the above additions. Merged K3B into the /slax/base/007-kdeapps module.
It's been decided: this is the last rev of the HAWKPE-CD image that will contain Linux. I had a crash on my main PC and the absence of certain (upcoming) additions could've saved me a lot of work and possibly preserved a lot of priceless stuf. So, the next release will be split in two: a CD (ISO) image which will have even more DOS/Windows-based tools and a DVD (ISO) image, which will have a fully-restored Slax, *in addition* to the usu DOS/Windows tools.
* AT LAST ! See README-HAWKPE for details (at the end of the file) of how you can make a bootable, HAWKPE USB-thumb drive. The section is called (not remarkably) 'HAWKPE-USB'. Also added a section called 'SLAX AND VIDEO' with procedures for dealing with KDE not making the full switch to GUI mode (ie. displaying only a blank screen.)