Good day,
I suspect this kind of question should be asked before, so I was a bit surprised when I couldn't find anything similar(or my search terms were wrong). Could someone suggest me a method or tool to create a "persistent" Windows live USB image, which could save all newly created files and personal settings to the same USB flash drive it is booted from? Because it is annoying to have a "fresh" OS every time you boot it from USB. I just found some tools like Live USB Creator which are able to create such image, but they just work with various Linux distributions and I could not find even a hint about Windows. Any ideas, please?

Hi Minster

With BartPE / WinPE

there are a number of things to consider if you want to save ALL changes & configuration to a usb device

by default a ramdrive B: is created and anything on B: is lost when powering down or rebooting
This is because BartPE development started on a CDROM and many programs demand to write to disk.

Any changes to BartPE/WinPE registry are in memory and not written back to disk

if you change TMP/TEMP/RAMDRV settings from B: to X: (and disable ramdrive) and use XP with SP2 or SP3 as the source files you can deal with first problem. ( WinPE boot disk will always be X:)

Most programs which are copied to the ramdrive need not be copied there if running on usb flash memory.

Dealing with registry is far more difficult (no known solution)

A BartPE on usb memory can have programs and data, menu settings (nu2menu.xml) updated without rebuilding from scratch.

regards

Mike Barnes

Check out UNetbootin.

As for BartPE on a USB drive, all settings that effect the Registry are saved, whether for Windows or apps. Settings that effect only the app, like bookmarks for a browser, may not be saved if the app runs from RAM. However, configuring the app to save it's bookmarks on the the system drive is not that hard to do and retains the app's speed running from the RAM drive.

Basically how much you want to save depends on your desires and needs and how much work you want to put into customizing your system.

The hard way to create a "persistent" (linux jargon) Bartpe, build Bartpe with XPE plugin, FBWF plugin, change B: to X: in ramdrive plugin, and then install Bartpe in the USB device or normal HD.
You will be able to "persistently" install new software or update the already installed.

The easy way is to use portable applications, for example portable Firefox, they do not need registry entries, they work without installation

Ah yes, I forgot this way change the ramdrive's drive letter. Good point.

There maybe a plugin or two that has the B: hard coded but they should be easy to fix.

Thank you all for sharing the ideas, I was curious about the same question, wanted to create a persistent USB image cuz having new OSes every single time is quite obnoxious. I haven't tried any of your suggestions yet, but I'm going to do that on weekend. I'll report on the results!