Mark Twain wrote:
I have a Dell Dimension 8200 (Seagate Barracuda 7200 HD 160GB)
with XP, SP3, Spywareblaster, Avast, Malwarebytes, Malwarebytes
Anti-Exploit and Windows Firewall.

I'm trying to create a bootable rescue disk with Macrium but I
seem to be doing something wrong.

In the first place I had to download a newer version of Macrium.

I clicked on the top left to create the bootable disk, but then
not sure whether I should use PE 3.1 or PE 4.0 since I had to
upgrade macrium. I selected PE 3.1 and then clicked rebuild and
the following screens appeared:

http://i62.tinypic.com/2ijk7xd.jpg

http://i60.tinypic.com/oiy5vn.jpg

http://i57.tinypic.com/xap4j7.jpg

http://i57.tinypic.com/2gt2lcn.jpg

http://i62.tinypic.com/ymh5e.jpg

http://i58.tinypic.com/34sldlc.jpg

If I selected PE 4.0 I get this:

http://i62.tinypic.com/2n9l280.jpg

Thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks,
Robert

Where you select "CD/DVD drive", there is an
option in there to "Create ISO file" or similar.
So in addition to being able to select your optical
drive, there is an additional menu item in there
to create an intermediate "rescue.iso" file.

Select a place your user account has access to
(C:\users\robert\Downloads maybe), and save the
rescue.iso file there.

That should give you a ~200MB "rescue.iso" file.
Mine is a different size than yours, because
I happen to have a different WinPE than you.

Now, using your favorite CD/DVD burner software
(like Imgburn or Nero), you can convert the
rescue.iso file into a bootable CD, using blank
media placed in your optical drive.

As for the version of WinPE package used, whether
it is 3.1, 4.0, 5.0 or whatever. I don't think it
makes that much difference. Maybe it makes a difference
if you were interacting with the build process,
installing a network driver or something. But for
this simple build recipe, just use whatever file
version was downloaded. The 3.1 package would have
been WinXP or Vista era perhaps. The 5.0 might be
more aligned with Windows 8, in terms of when they
were released. Just use the one you've got, burn a
test CD, and see if it boots. You don't need to
build a collection of all the WinPE versions.
Unless you're having a lot of trouble getting
your rescue CD to boot or something.

Alternately, if you use virtual machine software,
you can take "rescue.iso" and use it in a virtual
machine, and do a test boot in there. But that
isn't all that good a test, except to rule out
really busted rescue.iso builds. The VM environment
has entirely different emulated hardware than the
real computer, so if it boots in there, that doesn't
prove that all driver issues are solved.

I never figured out how to add a network driver to
my rescue.iso, but I wasn't sufficiently motivated
for that to bother me all that much. So it whines
a bit when it boots - who cares :-) The reason
I have such an attitude, is I'm not all that
convinced it has an effective "network share"
selection method when you boot it. I haven't
seen a picture of that dialog yet, to know how
good it is.

Paul