AI Repair USB — a whole AI repair shop on one stick 🛠️
Boot a dead PC into a Chinese-language AI repair system. Plug the same stick into a healthy PC and get a portable AI workstation — Claude Code, Codex CLI, and more, zero install, zero residue. Your tools follow you, not your machines.
Boot → mount the data partition → network check → the AI assistant's main menu (recorded in QEMU from the v0.3 ISO).
One stick, four jobs:
| What it does |
|---|
| 🔧 AI Repair Engineer | PC won't boot / BSOD loop / forgotten password / BitLocker? Boot from the stick into a Debian 12 live system with a conversational AI that walks you through disk checks, data rescue, password resets, and reinstalls. Dangerous operations always require explicit confirmation. |
| 📄 Office Assistant | On a healthy PC, double-click AI-Workstation and pick the office-assistant mode: drafts, Excel formulas, email polish, report formatting. No admin rights, no system changes — safe on a borrowed laptop. |
| 💻 Install Master | Windows 10/11 ISOs are fetched live from Microsoft's official servers (we never redistribute a single Microsoft byte); Debian 12 netinst ships on the stick. |
| 🤖 Portable AI agents | Codex CLI, OpenClaw and Pi ride along, pre-wired to any Anthropic/OpenAI-compatible gateway. Plug into any PC and start coding. |
Works on: repair mode boots any PC from the stick and targets Windows repairs (plus Debian installs); workstation mode plugs into healthy Windows hosts. Stick makers run on Windows / Linux / macOS.
Quick start
Windows (admin PowerShell, blank USB stick ⚠️ will be wiped):
irm https://usb.tokeneff.com/maker/usb-v1.0.ps1 | iex
Linux / macOS:
curl -sL https://usb.tokeneff.com/maker/usb-v1.0.sh | sudo bash
Prefer to audit first? curl -sLO https://usb.tokeneff.com/maker/usb-v1.0.sh && less usb-v1.0.sh — every component is pinned with a SHA256.
The maker asks you to check boxes for what you want (Claude Code / Codex / Windows ISO / Debian), verifies free AI credits against your email, and flashes everything via Ventoy — resumable, no babysitting.
Use your own key / self-hosted gateway
The stick talks to any Anthropic-compatible endpoint (we run one at tokeneff.com with free weekly credits, but it is optional):
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://your-gateway.example.com
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=sk-your-key
See docs/self-hosted-gateway.md for a 10-minute LiteLLM setup.
Why not just…?
| micro-PE / FirPE | bare Ventoy | manual Claude Code |
|---|
| AI-guided repair, conversational | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Works on a dead PC | ❌ (WinPE tools, no AI) | ❌ | ❌ |
| Zero install on a healthy PC | n/a | n/a | ❌ |
| Chinese-first UX | ✅ | menus | terminal |
| Restore/reinstall Windows + Debian | ✅ | manual | ❌ |
Reproduce the ISO
sudo bash setup-build-host.sh # Debian 12 build host
cd live-build-config && sudo bash build.sh
bash tests/smoke.sh # 15/15 no-hardware smoke tests
Full story in 05-tools/ (Chinese; English docs in progress — PRs welcome!).
Safety & disclaimer
- The one-liner installers execute remote scripts — audit them first if that bothers you; static copies are always at the same URLs.
- Repair operations that write to a disk always show a plan and ask for confirmation. Still: back up before you repair.
- Windows ISOs come straight from Microsoft's official download service at run time; this project distributes no Microsoft content.
Roadmap
See 01-planning/README.md for the full plan (Chinese).
Contributing
Issues and PRs welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The smoke suite runs without any hardware, so you can validate a change in five minutes.
License
MIT. Ventoy and other bundled upstream components keep their own licenses.
