A maintenance OS system may do all the right things, but fail as a safe maintenance platform if it does them in the wrong order.

A classic example is a RAM tester that runs a lot of code and reads the sick PC's hard drive before providing a UI to launch it, then writes to the hard drive and reboots into that, then writes results into the hard drive installation's logs, which can only be read by booting the complex and write-happy OS installed on the sick PC's hard drive.

When approaching a sick PC, nothing can be assumed.  Before booting the hard drive installation, malware must be excluded or cleaned up.  Before that can be done, we must know that the file system is safe to write to.  Before we can write to the file system, we need to know the hard drive is physically intact, and before we do anything at all, we need to know the rest of the hardware, RAM in particular, is sane. 

The formal maintenance process is a matter of re-establishing these assumptions one by one, before standing on each to test and repair the next.

Windows is a productivity OS that assumes everything works, which is true most of the time.  When doubts about that assumption arise, one reaches for a maintenance OS (mOS), which may have been a DOS boot diskette until NTFS, 137G and modern incompatible interfaces faded that out.  Today, the choice will be between Bart PE, a Linux "Live CD", or WinPE.

As the name implies, Windows Pre-installation Environment makes similar assumptions that everything works, else why would you be installing Windows on that system?  WinPE has matured as a "PE", and only recently has Microsoft turned attention to re-purposing it as a mOS.  In contrast, Bart PE has been used as a mOS for some years, and has attracted widespread community support.

Casual newsgroup advice etc. is driven to break these formality rules because it is "too difficult" to follow them, and that is because we currently lack tools that respect these rules.  WinRE is great, but  embodies this problem; it aims to be an easy automatic fixer, but as it lacks undoability and fine-grained control, it is less suitable for formal or professional use.

In my opinion, the basic logic of WinPE, RE and installation DVD needs to be revised for the context of broken reliability and safety assumptions.

I'd love to see a product group charged with re-developing WinPE and the Vista DVD from the perspective of safe maintenance, drawing together such skills and interest as are currently scattered across other product groups and projects.  And I'd love to find a point of contact with such a team.

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