os2fan2

I was planning to do this kind of setup: 1. Windows on H:\WINNT (a 4g drive) 2. Data on N:\NTUSER50\ (a 73 g drive) What happened is that while this worked, it also created a user on H:\Documents and Settings and ran things from there. More over, adding drives, and resizing N: in something like PQMAGIC under a different boot, created lots of different locations for N:\NTUSER50 etc, which is hard to handle. Also, some settings (like setting folder icon settings) did not save, so i had to replicate this elsewhere. In practice, there are not many folders in the user profile to move out. It is therefore better to shift random files out to different drives. You should use some common sense here. TEMP is always good to move to a drive with a lot of space. This is true if you multi-boot as well, because the free space is effectively shared. If you are heavy into photos or music or movies, you might consider making a junction or 'link' to a folder in a different drive. Do this, and you won't have to reset the path on every save. You could fiddle the settings in registry or in tweakui to point the required files to the new locations. If you plan to embed this into a setup, it is also handy to have a batch file (and utilities) to run if things go amuck later on (or you really don't like the setup!).

It works under Windows 2000. All of the old updates have eventually been replaced by more recent versions, and it has no probs there, either.

In vista, the process is %SystemRoot%\System32\InfDefaultInstall.exe "%1" as it says in registry

When you move the profile directory off the system directory, it will treat it as a roaming profile, and cache it. You might want to move bits of the profile off the home tree (eg temp), or just live with the notion that Windows is pretty much an eighties operating system.

I like the tool. I was wandering if it were possible to use different sets of switches for no backup (/n) and for integrate /integrate:[browse]. The first one would be useful if you don't want backup files created. Thanks! W

findstr needs a NLS setting in registry. This may not exist in the default WinPE. If you plan to use WinPE as a rescue environment, then you need to set NLS settings. This is for things like compare files, etc, as well as sorting etc.

The program is not taking input from STDIO, so redirection and pipes are not going to work. You need to use some sort of keystack program, such as 4nt, or quercus rexx etc, which can send keys to a different window. I can't think of any free ones off hand. The other alternative is to look for some sort of switch in the program, such as -quiet or -q or -s or -silent, where the program does not provide any user interaction.

Look in the file SYSOC.INF, eg expand this from the cdrom. Replace instances of ,HIDE, with ,, . You can use something that will replace case-insensitive, to catch ,hide, as well. It should then work. It does in Windows 2000. My XP is broken at this time.

WinPE, its environments, factory.exe and others, are not used for setting up Windows at all. What these do is to create the Windows PE environment. %systemroot% refers to the directory that contains Windows PE (either harddrive:\minint or cdrom:\i386) Windir likewise points to these directories. You could, for example, have both WinPE (on d:\i386) and a copy of what is to be copied to the hard drive (eg \c\i386), on the same cdrom. When you build the hard disk (prepared and formatted by WinPE), you then run the install with a source of c:\i386 [so the files are available to the user] by using Winnt.exe. You can use, eg a version of Windows PE based on XP SP1 to set up Windows 2000, for example. The stuff about 'sealing' and 'resealing' has little to do with the end user. What these do is to reset the default countdown for the validation to undone, and allow OOBE to run. Factory.exe is a kind of menu-program, that runs different apps for different programs. It apparently loads up the run-once menu before this is run, and this is run when the system boots. It can, for example, run things like connect to a network for the source diskettes. FACTORY is used to copy the i386 directory, et al, from some off-computer source to the local computer, eg over a network, or from some other location (flash-disk or cd-rom). Files from the directory d:\winxp\i386 on the cdrom to, say c:\source on the hard drive. This is required, because the new owner of the computer must have the full i386 directory. WINNT is used to actually set Windows up. The source directory is the directory that contains the i386 directory, eg if the source is installed to c:\source\i386, then the source directory in WINNT is c:\source. Windows then copies the required files from here to $WIN_NT$.~BT and $WIN_NT$.~LS, the first on the boot drive, the second on the drive where the \WINDOWS directory is to eventuate.

More interesting tweaks for hivefix.inf This one is undocumented, but you can replicate the Vista user\public\ and user\default, rather than the previous version of "documents and settings\all users" and "documents and settings\default user" directories. Works a treat. ; This goes in [AddReg] section: HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList","ProfilesDirectory",0x00020002,"%DEFAULT_PROFILES_DIR%" HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList","AllUsersProfile",0x00000000,"%ALL_USERS%" HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList","DefaultUserProfile",0x00000000,"%DEFAULT_USER%" ; This goes into [Strings] ; Shell Folders ; default users at \users\default, all users at \users\public, as in vista. DEFAULT_PROFILES_DIR="%SystemDrive%\USERS" DEFAULT_USER="Default" ALL_USERS="Public" I tried another trick similar to the vista setup, where all of the shell folders like desktop &c go in a subdirectory under the userprofile, eg \USERS\WENDY\ICONS\DESKTOP. The ICONS directory would then have the desktop, sendto, and other .lnk files living side by side. This is how vista does it. It does not work under Windows 2k.

I use file manager/w for this. If you want to set the case to upper/lower/proper, then you highlight the victims, and it happens automatically. You can handle extentions as well. Some proggies are case sensitive to the file-system.

Hunt down a proggie called Win3xStart.exe. This modifies io.sys of msdos 7,1 to make it win31 compatible. You can still run the corresponding Windows 95/98 with it (even Windows 95A). W

Try the information at http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=82169 Here i detail a setup of Winnt 4 + sp6a + later in two boots. I used this setup to install Winnt on a 73GB diskette. NT's boot partition must be within the first 8 GB, but it can read partitions larger than 8 GB.

Shortcut.exe is on the win95 cdroms.

With cd-roms, one must bear in mind that a lot of computer BIOSes do not support the complete eltorito boot specs. You are better off using one of the modes that MS uses (eg a single boot block, which might load a menu, or 1440k floppies), because this is the common support for no emulation and emulation respectively.

Another reason to edit setup.hiv is to add things, like colour schemes. Unlike Windows 2k/xp, Windows NT 3.x / 4,x do not use HIVE*.INF to build their registries, they use prebuilt hive files. So if you want to apply the hive fixes for these Operating systems, you need to edit setup.hiv and whatever other .hiv files might exist.

Win98 has the same set of .bmp files as Win95/ME, except that 98/ME have a new setup.bmp. The .jpg files correspond to those in the 95 plus! pack, except more-windows is updated.

A generally unattended install, with a text-mode attend, is very useful if you are installing onto various partitions, but do not know the partition (or format it), until run time. Text mode takes a short time, and once done, one can move onto other things.

Some of the latest updates are server only, and you may need to fiddle with the install.inf, and repack it to get it to work on a workstation. See eg the info at http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/patch.htm for info on what to do.

There's a whole mob of them at http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10048 Wendy.

You could pack the win95 and win98 versions into two different installers, and use the two as a shell swap.

Google for dx5nt4.zip, and follow the links. eg http://dars.com.ru/download/support/microsoft/direct-x/ I merged it over the sp6 stuff, and it seems to work. None of the games i have (eg DOS 6.22 ) seem to require it, but your mileage may vary. As to slipstreaming SP into NT. This is not possible. The best you can do is to fake some bits (like atapi) see http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t82169.html for the gory details.

If you want to set times on system, you should ensure that your build of PE has the correct time zone installed. Note that the default PE installs i used in 2004 did not feature time localisation, to the extent that i wrote a plugin that set the localisations correctly. There are other reasons that you may want to do this as well, things like file-compare (older/younger), and sort algorithms require that the NLS settings be correctly made. W

The trick is to copy ntldr and ntdect.com to the boot partition (ie vista), into the \boot directory, ie c:\boot, as viewed from vista.

This is from Blkviper's guide to Windows services.