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BartPE vs WinPE

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What is the difference in the functionality of the BartPE vs WinPE plugins, other than the ability of the WinPE plugin to restore to dissimilar hardware?

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Hi Adam,
Where did you take that Win PE plugins are used to restore to a dissimilar hardware ?
A WinPE Plugin is a plugin that may be installed on a live CD such as Bart PE in order to run a computer where Windows cannot be launched, among other things.
I think you are mixing up two different dissimilar ...notions.

BartPE and WinPE are two different preinstalled environments under which ATI can be run. With the base (no Plus Pack) version, only a BartPE ISO can be made. The ATI Plus Pack, which has the Universal Restore facility, also has the WinPE ISO Builder as part of it. With the Plus Pack installed, Universal Restore is enabled on either BartPE or WinPE. The difference in BartPE versus WinPE - Universal Restore is available on both.

BartPE provides a basic 32-bit psuedo-Windows environment that has a variety of freeware disk tools available other than ATI. I have a BartPE ISO with both base ATI and Easesus Todo Backup (which is not worth bothering with in my opinion). BartPE has a version of the very useful A43 file management utility.

WinPE (I have version 2.0, which is nominally for Vista but works just fine on my XP SP3 machine) is much more versatile and has some good tools on it also, but is command line based. One really nice feature that Acronis added is the A43 file management utility (a somewhat newer version than standard with BartPE). You really have to spend some time with the Microsoft documentation (as suggested in the Acronis documentation) to see what WinPE has to offer. Personally, I find WinPE far better than BartPE.

A "plug-in" is simply a form of the software suitable to be incorporated in either a BartPE or WinPE ISO. So the plug-in refers to the software package (like ATI) and the ISO to the particular environment created. In the case of ATI with the Plus Pack, the plug-in for BartPE or WinPE are essentially equivalent, so they have the same functionality in either environment. Babac is correct - you seem to be confusing two different notions.

My preference is to do all disk images and disk image recovery in the recovery environment. I plan on using WinPE over BartPE, Acronis loader, and ISOLINUX CD's in the future.

I hope this information helps.