os2fan2

One must remember that DOS programs were designed to run on stand-alone machines, one at a time. Windows, and pretty much any multitasker, has to deal with shared use, such as spooling printers, file resources and other things which a computer needs to share. It's interesting to note the only way i could get DOS games (like DOOM) to run on some boxen, was to run it in a winoldap session: a DOS box under Windows. This is because Windows can provide more memory than raw DOS could. Likewise, in restricted memory systems, one might run windows games under DOS, by setting eg 'shell=spider.exe' in a copy of Windows 3.1,

Windows 3.1 came out in Easter 1992. I got a copy when i bought my first computer at that time. It was a 486 DX 33 with 8 MB of ram, and 120 MB of fixed disk, a 5.5 floppy and a 3.5 floppy, and vga graphics. Except for the graphics, it was a pretty mean machine in its day. The usual fare was a 386 with 4 MB and 40 MB disks were just going out of supply, but were still being sold. When you look at it, it looks pretty much like Windows 3.0, except a lot less grey. The shell program is 'progman' , which was considerably less potent than say, the DOS menu the computer came with, or even the program manager in DOSSHELL. You can't put groups inside groups. You look over the shell, and see what's missing. I really did not get use to the shell. Shell replacements were one of the largest classes of Windows 3.x apps. I think i tried 15 or so. TakeCommand, Praxim, WPSShell, Norton Desktop Windows, Bubba, Command Post, Becker tools shell, MS-DOS Executive, Spider, even Solitaire. The usual sport was 'program thinning'. DOS and Windows took up something like 20 MB, but you could thin out the rubbish to 10 MB or so. Norton Desktop (8 disks = 20 MB), and Becker tools (2 disks = 4 MB), were thinned down to 1 disk 750 KB. Five versions of Civ1 was thinned from 10 disks 15 MB to 3 disks 4 MB. Even DOS was culled. After 4DOS, Rexx, one sinks into OS/2 and multi boot, and then multi-multi-boot, and then even using one copy of windows in multi-boot with network-like install. OS/2 is a wonderful system to learn about Windows, and Windows is a wonderful system to learn about OS/2. About themselves, not so good. I rewrote the Windows install about 86 times, i suppose. I even replaced the tutorial with something useful (a welcome help system). It is still being developed. You could fix up most of the bugs in Windows by using the Win-OS/2 files, but i wasn't all that game in replacing things like winoldap.mod, etc. But the rest works.

You could use F Westlake's 'conset', which can read registry values into the current environment, eg conset /k zdir=HKLM\Software\wendy\folders\%1 This line looks for whatever %1 is, and returns the value to zdir. eg batch zsource might set zdir=l:\save\cdata\batch\zsource (the folder containing the source for batch files)

I started building a private slop-tape for Windows NT4, having sorted out most of the problems. Unlike a service pack, a slop-tape is simply a replacement of the files in the original distro, with some registry entries applied. Registry hacks are made to prebuilt hives. There have been some private builds of nt4 sp7, including a fairly rough one of mine. None of these have made it to prime time, though.

There's a power toy 'copy to folder' and 'move to folder' , which means ye send the stuff to a folder selected through the 'open folder' option.

Is there any plan to add support for boot drives that are FAT16? I tried to install Win2k onto a NTFS, but my boot drive is a DOS disk, which is a fat16 partition? The program looks quite good elsewise.

Fred Vorck's site deals with slipstreaming sata under w2k, this is the method for all NT vers 5.x. It involves making the files available on the share, and editing dosnet.inf (which is needed for copying the files over), and txtsetup.sif. You may also need to edit setupreg.hiv. This is a registry hive, which you can load into registry (as eg HKLM\Setup) and add registry stuff there. Have ye tried NLITE? this will add drivers.

This message is usually a sign that the hard disk is on the way out. Run chkdsk from safe mode for a start. If ye get messages about corrupt $i30 sector, just get a new hard disk.

You could patch the setupreg.hiv file to support larger disks. You need reg.exe from the Windows 2k supplement files (on the cdrom), and a location of the source files to eventually restore to cdrom The line 'set winsource=' points to the i386 directory of the files copied on the hard drive. Here, i have the cdrom on q:\wnt50sp4 All the rest stays as is. Burn your cdrom in the usual manner, and your cdrom will see large hard drives. I have windows 2000 installed in the middle of a 1 terabyte disk based on this modification. Reference: setlocal set winsource=q:\wnt50sp4\i386 attrib -r -a -s -h %winsource%\setupreg.hiv reg load HKLM\Setup %winsource%\setupreg.hiv set regkey=ControlSet001\Services\atapi\Parameters reg add HKLM\Setup\%regkey% /v EnableBigLba /t reg_dword /d 00000001 /f reg unload HKLM\Setup set winsource= set regkey= endlocal

What the "Bart geeks" say is that ye can not build a WinPE environment out of Windows 2000 or anything before XP sp1. This is not a regular install of Windows: the registry is not saved after a session. There's many issues involved in loading Windows in MiniNT form, that is not in the regular form. Installing a usable Windows 2000 session on a diskette, is a different story. There are of course, technical issues, including telling Windows to look into disk 0 for boot. There are also other issues in that USB pen drives are not exactly suited to the abuse that registry does to hard disks. Most hard disk failures i have seen have been at the point where the registry gets written. Still, i should not imagine that it would be an insurmountable problem: even if the disk is swapped from a computer to a USB case.

The necessary support to build PE environments was first implemented in Windows xp sp1. If ye mean to use an earlier version of windows than this, ye need to devise your own method. OS/2 from vers 3 has had this support. Just shows how far Windows really is. (today's tired technology)

I add the stuff in winnt.sif [GuiRunonce]. The files are added by way of dosnet.inf and txtsetup.sif. You put them in a known position (i use the INF folder. You then run the files by way of eg "%Systemroot%\INF\fixmach.inf" etc. One batch corrects registry. The second makes desktop icons. For this, i use the rare but findable 'shortcut.exe' from NT4 sp2 kit. With the advent of windows vista and other virii, you could use something like 'conset.exe' (another freeware) to drag registry into the current environment. You need to change to the directory where the shortcut is to be set to do this. Rexx is to be investigated...

one fries bigger fish during the night -> http://www.os2fan2.com/gloss/index.html

Then again, it's possible to use linkd or junction, to point this to a new location. ren "my Documents" personallinkd "my Documents" (new path and file) Copy My Documents to new location. Works like a charm.

This i found on one of Bearwin's sites. It works under 2K, XP Pro, Home and XP64. cd /d %systemroot%\system32 copy console.dll *.cpl copy hotplug.dll *.cpl What it does is adds two new control panel applets: console.cpl is the same as in Windows NT 3 and 4, is a global setting. hotplug.cpl is the dialog box that opens when you insert a USB device, etc. Being a cpl applet, you can make a shortcut to it, and put it in the start menu quick launch bar or on the desktop. You don't have to hope it's in the tray. May have a use in HFSLIP.

UnknownDevices by Halfdone has a full list read by an application. Look also at SYSLINUX program HDT.C32, which does the same thing from a boot cdrom, complete with four different tables for PCI/USB/etc.

Have a look in setupreg.hiv, you will see that it loads various things like device drivers and services. Things ye might include here are alternate disk driver utilities, or video drivers: pretty much anything that needs a service. Because in essence, this is the registry for the character mode setup. The full setup is not made until the character mode setup is done: watch the bottom line as setup is run. You will see it loading hivesft, hivedft, etc at the very end of the process.

I've pried MS-DOS 7.1 from Windows 98se, and modified it so that it does no version check. Some 622 files (like mouse.com, mscdex.exe), are added to the mix. Still, it fits on a single floppy uncompressed. Most run nicely under Windows NT/2K/XP/etc. The QBASIC system is heavily revised. You can now access the DOS help system from inside the editor, so you can cut and paste text from help. QBasic also has the phatcode patch, the *.* patch applied. Help is rewritten to cover the new utilities added. (except where.exe, exetype.exe) Programs from the oldmsdos packages have been modified to match the 7.1 dos version, although deversioned themselves. share,exe comes from Windows 95.

The HIVE*.INF settings do work, but are changed later by other INF files. You have to mangle some programs in the manner of fred vorck to get w2k to behave properly.

Take Command from jpsoftware (includes tcc=4nt), now exists in a 64bit version Regina rexx comes in 64bit version.

The particular DLL i suggested will, when ye right-click on the background of a folder, offer to open the command prompt in that folder. For the microsoft one, ye need to be in the parent of the current folder, which is different in some explorer windows. (eg My Documents has parent 'desktop' in explorer, but the correct folder is the user root.) Another one is to try spiritpyre's DLL extentions, which also work under Win2k.

You could use MaDdOg's "chooseos", which adds support for multiple Win9x boot into NTLDR's boot.ini. http://www.maddogsw.com/bootchooser/ You then install the different Windows into different directory names on diffeent drives, eg c:\win95, d:\win98 This is because regardless of where you install Windows9x , it creates a corresponding directory on the c:\ drive, eg install it to h:\legacy, will add boot files also to c:\legacy.

I'm pretty sure that the xp power toy installs under 2k also. I have been using cmdopen.dll from http://code.kliu.org/cmdopen/ which even works on the current window's background (eg right-click on background, open prompt to current folder). It's quite good. I made a little hack to it to open cmx.exe instead of cmd.exe (replace instances of cmd.exe by cmx.exe), and then made a copy of 2k/xp write.exe as cmx.exe, but to open a different program (eg 4nt.exe). Simply replacing cmx.exe to different versions opens different command processors (eg defanged cmd.exe). Another program to use is Spiritpyre's shell extentions (google "spiritpyre") You can download either the shell menu or selected shell extentions. The former allows you to add your own items to a pop-out menu from the default context menu. You can simply change the command in the configurator program that comes with it.

You could make hardlinks using something like LINKD or JUNCTION, to move the directories wherever you want to. It's just a matter of pointing the folder to a different location.

There are some useful things ye can do to the setup files, to allow for modern hardware. 1. In SYSTEM.INI [386Enh], set "PageOverCommit=2". This prevents windows creating too big a page file. If you want to modify the source, the file to unpack is SYSTEM.SR_. 2. If ye have more than 20 MB, consider either having no paging file, or a very tiny one. The default is three times memory, which was fine when computers had 2M of ram, but it really does not need it these days. I never used a paging file on 20 MB ram, with no ill effects. 3. Windows 3.x does not check files. You could pretty much add/subtract anything from setup.ini. I've been doing custom Windows since 1994. There is a file size limit of 64 KB on Setup.ini, so it's pretty much what ye can cull. 4. If ye have an upgrade version, the upgrade check is "does win.com exist?" 5. The auto-setup file is Setup.shh. This is the 'winnt.sif' kind of setup. 6. You can use setup /a to unpack the files, and setup /n to create a minimal directory. Note here that the home directory will have just win.com and winver.exe, along with the .INI files. A neat trick here is that you can stick all of the .EXE files (like write, winhelp, &c into a different pathed directory, to stop them being over written. A program like DDEEXEC, take command/16 or Norton's group.exe (from NU8 or something), does quite nicely at creating and populating groups. One of my windows versions is a minimal one with just progman.exe, to which i use DOS batch files (with MAINTINI.EXE) and some Windows things to add not just the desktop, but all of the user apps as well.