\"Real\" windows boot CD

[Semios]

Ok,

Just an update.  I made a somewhat workeable hybrid cd - it contained most all of what would normally be in your windows\system folder on the cd, and the image was still around only about 80 MB.  Conclusion: after lots of work, just don't do it.  It does save memory, but it is really really slow.  I don't recall having any error messages at all; it wasn't a useless cd, but it wasn't very fruitful and it was alot of trouble.  I would suggest everyone abbandon the idea - even a fast cd access is alot slower than HD access, and a WHOLE lot slower than ram access. consider that your drivers are whats in the system folder, and nothing is ever going to be faster than the drivers, so using them on the cd makes sure that the whole system is bogged down considerably.

food for thought.

Semios

[Semios]

as promised, here ya go:

Windows on Cd Project

This is the tutorial: all 16 pages of it.  Have fun

[Jazkal2]

Great guide Semios.

I created a PDF from your web pages, (just for my personal use) would you like me to send it to you? (it's only 83k in size)

Thanks again for the good work.

[Semios]

Thanks Jazkal2!

I'm gonna pass on your pdf right now, although I really admire that file size! it's tiny!  the orignal word doc was lots bigger than that.  I may take you up in it later, but now I'm just happy to have the pages up and people visiting them.  I think I sweated the tutorial more than making this system work.


lates,
Semios

[scalar]

Someone asked how you make a generic Windows 98 boot CD. Well, what you need to do is shoot Plug 'n Play in the foot.


I am a rather evil person, in that I've migrated Win 95/98/Me hard drives from one machine to the next using a really scary approach:

1. Boot old computer into Safe Mode.

2. Open Device Manager, and start deleting EVERYTHING!

3. Delete all ports, devices, system resources, etc etc. You want that puppy blank.

4. Remove hard drive, put in new/different PC, power up.


When Windows comes alive on the new system, it will look really plain.. 640x480, 16 colors. In fact, in this state, plug 'n play is itself NOT INSTALLED so it can't and won't do plug 'n play detection.

Next step, reinstall plug 'n play. You can do this simply by going to Add New Hardware and detecting any devices. Along the way it'll find some various items plus a weird Plug 'n Play component. Once this installs, Windows will suddenly go mad redetecting drivers, possibly even before you can reboot after this initial detection.

Driver reinstallation is a long process, involving many reboots. If it prompts for a driver search, just keep hitting next next, don't look at CD/floppy/etc, finish. In the end it may have duplicate keyboards and duplicate floppy controllers, which can be removed once it's settled down after ten or so reboots.

Now you can carry on with your old programs, games, documents, etc, but on an 1800mHz system rather than the old 600mhz system.



When creating a CD, if you delete every device, and do NOT reinstall the plug 'n play component, it may run just fine off the CD with no devices whatsoever listed in the device manager. This Windows, with a castrated form of Plug 'n Play may work just fine on many different PC types, without trying to detect and install any new/unknown devices in the various PCs.

If you want, you could Add New hardware, but don't do plug 'n play and only install generic drivers yourself. This way you can pick a generic VGA display driver, a generic network card driver, etc.

[Semios]

disabling shell hardware detection is a good idea, and there are numerous ways to do it.  YOu need to consider doing a few thigns first, though.

1) Generic vga means 640*480 at 16 colors. its ugly as hell but funcitonal if you use Tahoma font at 6-8 points.  it is functional, but not pretty.  this, of course, defeats one of the reasons what I attempted this thing in the first place: make somethign like knoppix that isn't as ugly.

2) There are no generic modem or net drivers that work well with differing systems.  Network card drivers are all pretty specific; there are a few modem drivers that work well with different cards, but you're playing russian roulette like that.

Scalar's way of changing system's isn't bad. Its easier to do it from the registry though - just delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Enum , as wellas ControlSet001 and ControlSet002.  ALternatively, RegCleanr offers a hardware reset switch which automatically does this for you. normall, though, it will boot you into hardware detection on the next boot.

GOtta run,
Semios

[khalidnet2002]

[quote name=\'Semios\' date=\'Jul 2 2003, 11:03 AM\']as promised, here ya go:

Windows on Cd Project

This is the tutorial: all 16 pages of it.  Have fun[/quote]
 good job.
thanx a lot for ur great effort.

[Hard disk emulation?]

Vary cool. BTW, is there a reason not to simply install windows to a small hard drive (tweaked per the tutorial) and burn a hard disk emulation Cd rather than booting from floppy image?

[Semios]

A quick answer:  most of the trouble with running windows from a cd is dealing with the necessary write access.  There are obviously a few other things to overcome, but the #1 problem is being able to write to system.dat and user.dat, as well as some .inf and .ini files.  Hard drive emulation, if you just utilized a _normal_ windows installation, would not overcome the write problem and so you would get at best a significant amount of error messages and at worst, something that wouldn't boot at all.  if you chose to use HD emulation, you would still have to set up a ram disk to host either the main files that have to be written and rewritten, or the whole system - and if you do that, there is basically very little differences between floppy and HD emulation.

The closest thing to what you are referring to would be a drivespaced windows installation.  you _can_ technically do this - I know you can pull it off with 95, but I don't know about 98.  Basically what you do is set up a drivespaced HD, install everything, make a floppy that loads up drivespace and doublespace, loads cd drivers and then uses the compressed image that you slyly copied onto your cd.  it turns out that its a pretty easy approach - lots easier than my way, but the incompatabilities with Windows98 somewhat limit you. I won't explain much more about how to set this kind of cd up, but you can find info on it on google.

its late and I gotta run.

regards,

Semios

[Hard disk emulation?]

Thanks for the informative posts.

[simplico]

Hi Semios.  I have read your excellent tutorial. Thank you so much for the effort. If my interpretation is correct, what you have done is create a ver. of win98+selected programs that is loaded into a ramdrive(X:) in its entirety and runs from there. Therefore once that happens, the CD can be removed and the CD drve is usable in a normal fashion. In other words, once fully loaded, the operating system does not need access to the CD that it booted and loaded from. Is this correct?

[weisskater]

[color=\"red\"][font=\"Arial\"] http://images.thetechguide.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'\' /> thanks everybody[/color][/font]

[Semios]

Simplico, thats exactly right.  I could have just told you how to run win98 off a ramdisk, but some of the other progs were too practical for me to not recommend them, showing what you can get on a small ramdisk.  

and yes, you can take out the cd. I once made a verison that ran partially from the ramdisk and part from the cd - it was more space efficient but it was like running windows98 on an 386 at 2 mhz!

lates,

SEmios

[khalidnet2002]

@Semios
u wrote:

Code: [Select]

Run coa2to change address of:

1. windows directory – change from d:\windows (or wherever you put it) to x:\windows

2. Program files directory – change from d:\Program Files (or whever you put it) to x:\program files

Be CAREFUL when you do this; you can’t merely substitute X: for C: because COA2 would substitute all the shortcuts on your main OS and they would cease to function. This is major trouble. If you have gotten to this point but cannot substitute without botching up other OS shortcuts, reinstall in different directories. It’s worth the trouble of not frying the other OS.
but my hard drive letters do not have X letter.
and COA2 needs to see a partition with the X letter.
what can i do?

[Semios]

if you haven't already done it, set up a ramdisk in your autoexec. something like this will due fine:

command\xmsdsk 392000 x: /y /t /c2

the size doesnt matter.  then make the directories on it:

md x:\windows
doslfn
md x:\program files

coa2 will then see the drive and the directories and should give no problems.

hope it helps,

Semios

[WMECD]

First of all, a huge thank you to Semios!

I just complete my windows installation and it works flawlessly, even with 32 bit access! I used Windows Millenium and a small utility callen WINMEDOS which allows ME users to boot into DOS.

Since I wont be using hard drives while using this ME version on CD (well I will use them but via network hehe), I didn't bother changing the install dir from C to X. Windows ME's IO.sys is different from Windows 98. So my ram drive is C: and that saves a lot of steps.

By not renaming esdi_506.pdr, I had some big problems at first. Windows would lock up when I accessed the A drive (via windows explorer or with NERO's interface). But I disabled the A drive with Tweak UI and just before loading windows the last command is ettool -t. It gives me a read access error but I just hit A for abort then windows loads and works flawlessly! Any tips on how I could enter that 'a' in my batch file?

Also I used a combination of zip and lzop for compression. LZOP is the fastest decompressor available, see for yourself @ www.compression.ca. Great gain of speed over zip for extraction. I use zip also because I dont know how to compress a directory structure using lzop.

Hurray to CD burning after booting from CD haha!

Hey Semios, do you accept PayPal donations ?

[WMECD]

Oh yeah, pkunzip from pkz204g.exe is too old it doent support long file name extraction. Use pkunzip 2.50.

[Semios]

Thanks for the praise wmecd!  I'm glad to see that someone else is getting it to work - and its a testimonial to the viability of the system.  I'm also glad you got ettools to work - mine would just refuse to kill emulation mode.  by the way, what burning program did you use?  I knoew from experience that easycd and nero use different ways of emulating floppies and of using file systems.

I just finished burning a cd that I'm pretty proud of too.  I have to go work on some computers next week, so I have a cd which (among being able to install windows 95, 98 and 98se in english and italian) will let me choose to boot 3 different systems.
1) 110MB ramdisk, accessing my programs on the cd instead of from the ramdisk, which has lots of freespace.
2) 110 MB ramdisk, with the programs on the ramdisk also, so its fast and still has around 30 mb free
3) a minimal RAM system - I've gotten my windows folder reduced down to, get this, 55 MB!! so I have a 58 MB ram disk and access the program files on the cd.


Here's some hints: if you're making something like a PE system, that is used for maintanence, pre-installs and similar things, you can probably rip out both network support and multimedia support. Network support isn't just what you get out from the add-remove applet of course: there are more than 20MB of files.  Multimedia support is likewise - around 20 MB that you mostly don't need.  I can make up a list of these files later if anyones interested.

Another trick not in the tutorial: if you have lots of programs which access mscvrt.dll and a few of those similar dll's that prog's isntall in their own directories, install the programs into the same directory. it saves lots of space and redundancy.

I just checked and I actually have an active and useful paypal account. its at [email protected].  I'm a missionary, so I ALWAYS accept donations.

how about some feedback: I was thinking of trying to come up with a system that would work like PEbuilder (which Microsoft so nastily forced to be removed) and use your installation to build a base system maintenance iso. Does anyone think this would be useful? any desire to help out? I think virtual basic could do the trick, but I haven't programed in more than 10 years now.  I'm not making any promises, its just an idea I had. what do you folks think?

[WMECD]

Thanks again semios! Hehe I am so glad this works, I am posting this from my new Millenium system booted from CD.

Maybe ettool works for me maybe because of Millenium's system files wich are different from windows 98.

I used Nero to burn my bootable CD. I got a neat trick for "installing NERO". Execute Nero's setup, then when the setup screen appears all its needed files will be extracted in a temporary folder. Hunt down that directory and there you will find a directory named Nero. Just copy that directory into your program files and that is it, Nero is installed and working. No need for useless registry entries!

How did you reduce your windows installation that far? I used 98lite, not micro, and my windows is a fat 175 megs decompressed. Any tips or list of useless files?

Also do you have any tips on that win386.swp swap file ? I can't stand seeing it jump suddenly from 15 megs to 65 megs then up and down again when I load small  3 meg programs...

[vtnamus]

[color=\"blue\"]Great idea!!

The Win-Boot CDs  are really useful for us to take control and make maintenance on Computer System. Especially, when the System is infected spy programs or cracked down, my God, we really need "these Tools".

But I only need the ISO files of your created CDs  http://images.thetechguide.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'\' /> .
My system runs on Windows XP and I have not got Win98 Installation Disk. I am sure many people around are like me, only need those ISO files to create their own CDs simply.

So, for the God sake, let upload your ISO files. Plsssssss!! http://images.thetechguide.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'\' /> [/color]