Daemonforce

Not sure about it, but why go through that trouble if you can just put it on the backgroundpicture.... Good point. Anyway I got it. Turns out that Reshack and Resedit are two different things when saving. Reshack actually does what it's intended to while ResEdit just fux0rs the whole kernel. I also fixed a nasty screen flash right before the fade in.

I have also been curious as to how this can be done. I'm certain that if WINNT32 can be customized, so can WINNT.

Saw this thing three days ago... Looks like the biggest development since LAN. o_O

Ugh....Is there any way to force the kernel into loading these seperated resources into memory when booting? =/

Nice thread. Is there any way to force the SP2 kernel to use the resources that state the flavor labels(Home Edition/Professional/Tablet PC/Media Center Edition/Embedded.......)? If not it looks like I'll be looking for my kernel archive and ripping several #1s with Booteditor.

An actual wall blended into the background with the logonui or a solid color that appears before the logon screen?

For the past week I've had nothing but problems when trying to restore the pre-SP2 bootscreen details to a SP2 installation. I can't change the bootscreen in any way other than the visible images on a SP2 screen. I can't get "Home Edition" or "Professional" to show up under it when trying to change the resource. Is there any reason behind this?

I never make seperate partitions....Just seperate devices. Since nothing boots off my 300GB SATA drive, I don't have to worry about losing my OS unless I decide to be stupid and install .NET Server. Losing your OS is bad.......Losing your OS when your stuff is encrypted/compressed is worse. I'm trying to edit the resources in the boot screen and I'm going through the process of actually editing them. OMFG! It's like my Windows 95 days when I was still using a Corel game engine to make second-class apps! I'm going to force the new data into ISOs and try booting them.

Yeah....I've been trying to edit the bootscreen resources but nothing changes. I've only been editing ntoskrnl, so maybe I should try something else? =/ I'm testing these in VMWare. I have one of Intel's older Prescotts, so maybe the CPU detection is thrown off a bit in a Vritual Machine.

It doesn't work. I'm not sure what it is, but there's definitely something in SP2 that is keeping me from messing with the bootscreen. =/ Replacing the ntoskrnl in safe mode makes Windows think Ntfs.sys is corrupt. ****...This has me so confused that I can't even post a legitimate sentence.

Way back when it was released at PDC it could function with.....Windows Update! O_O The funny thing is it was before the new year and it acted like SP2 for XP should have been!

That's just it. No I don't. I can't get the bootloader to change and I'm not sure why. I edit the SP1 files on a machine with SP1 and as soon as I overwrite the SP2 data and integrate, my effort becomes null. I have no idea why I can't change the bootloader. That's a bit boring...Because...Ya know...I know the order of what loads and from where. I feel like a geek. o_O .............. I'm just trying to restore the old bootscreen will display the specific OS information like it used to. I have attempted to force the Win2005 bootloader on Windows 2000 and Windows NT, but it seems to only work with XP and 2003 for some reason. Anyway that's different...I'm just trying to edit bootscreens so that they look like they were supposed to. I don't like some generic WINDOWS XP bootscreen, and I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

1. You need to make a full WINNT.SIF like I did. Here's a good example from my W2KP distribution...^-^ ;SetupMgrTag [Data] AutoPartition=1 MsDosInitiated="0" UnattendedInstall="Yes" [unattended] UnattendMode=FullUnattended OemSkipEula=Yes OemPreinstall=No TargetPath=WINDOWS WaitForReboot=No NoWaitAfterTextMode=1 NoWaitAfterGUIMode=1 ProgramFilesDir="C:\Program Files" CommonProgramFilesDir="C:\Program Files\Common" DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore NonDriverSigningPolicy=Ignore [GuiUnattended] AdminPassword=* EncryptedAdminPassword=No OEMSkipRegional=1 TimeZone=4 OemSkipWelcome=1 ProfilesDir=%systemdrive%\Users\ AutoLogon=Yes AutoLogonCount=1 [userData] FullName="Windows User" ComputerName=* [Display] BitsPerPel=32 Xresolution=1024 YResolution=768 Vrefresh=60 [TapiLocation] CountryCode=1 Dialing=Tone AreaCode=360 [identification] JoinWorkgroup=WORKGROUP [Networking] InstallDefaultComponents=Yes [RegionalSettings] LanguageGroup=1 Language=00000409 [branding] BrandIEUsingUnattended=Yes [Proxy] Proxy_Enable=0 Use_Same_Proxy=0 The TXTGUI is something I choose to force attend because of partition information and file system compatibility. There are old pieces of crap that do not like NTFS and seem to only work with FAT. Something after the installation seems to fix it so that NTFS works later on, but I don't know what it is. =/ 2. Quit being a noob. I didn't need to enter a CD key and neither should you. Fix your setup info. Attended setup is annoying, but not as annoying as adjusting your COA at every install on several machines. 3. This is the point where I yell at you for being a noob again....=/ 4. Trial and error: Load the WINNT.SIF in your i386 directory and LEAVE IT! Windows setup doesn't look for it in the CD root and it certainly isn't going to work if you don't put it in i386. God forbid putting it on floppy for it to read...VMWare wangsturbates on the floppy data, but it's probably a good alternative if you're into editing your file setup information and have a bunch of UnAttend files on a floppy for each of your operating systems. Just a note that it looks for the Unattend information on the CD first as a default and pays attention to any information on floppy if in fact one exists to argue. As handy as it can be, not every machine has a floppy drive and it would be in your best interest as a network administrator to keep the setup information on the CD where it needs to be. =/

Windows Longhorn Professional build 6.0.4051. Best OS....Ever! o_O I get the highest benchmarks when using it. XP and 2000 don't even come close.

I just don't like the auto-security settings preset from the installation. It's gone a long way since .NET Server RC2 and I don't like the new bugs in IIS and the indexing service. I just shut them off. I'm probably going to go back to Windows 2000 Advanced Server because of these two issues.

I'm sure everyone here remembers Windows XP and what the bootloader used to look like on their flavor of Windows XP. I'm sure everyone also recalls what SP2 integration does to it too... Lets bring the old bootloader back! I've been poking around in the i386 directory all day and I've noticed that a few people like to change their bootloaders by editing one or all of the kernels listed in their system directory. Well, why can't the same be done to the installation disc? I notice there are two issues to this... The NT kernel in the i386 folder seems related to the preinstallation environment while the kernels in driver.cab are related to the bootloader AFTER setup completes. It appears that if we play it right, we can make a smartloader: A loader that can show what exactly is booting on the workstation. While a pointless effort, it just seems like something fun to do and something to stop a lot of headaches from people that have no idea what is going on with their boot.ini. I have tried uncompressing the files, extracting them, ripping old kernel information from retired sources and injecting the old data into the new set: CABs and all. While I'm amazed the setup and post-install don't go hal on me, it still doesn't change the loader from the mysterious SP2 blank-layered bootloader. Is there any way to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Ahahahaahahahaha! No it won't. We have had several flavors of Windows 2000 and more for Windows XP. Now there's more if not equal to XP's release for Vista's roadmap. When we were using NT3.5-5.2 we had a special way of installing Windows from disc. The CAB method was dropped from 9X/DOS and we started using the i386 directory. That has gone on for about ten years and we still haven't changed it?! o_O I think not! Vista uses the Windows Image method for installation. In order for our fun crap like nLite, HFSLIP, XPCREATE, BartPE and all that other fun junk to work on Vista, we would have to contact the vendors to have them take a look at how these programs grab the information from the installation disc. ....................... OMFG! i386 =/= INSTALL.WIM! O_O There's just no way it's going to happen. For one...such programs would have to use the Ximage tool just to READ the mess of data much less extract it...Then it would have to find the files and figure out what goes where. This can be an extremely annoying process if it isn't sorted. I have no idea how the WIM is organized other than the fact that there can be several disc images in such a file format. It's too complicated and too big of a disaster to figure out. Even if it can be figured out, who's to say that every flavor of Vista is going to be sorted under the same rules? The alternate method to this is forcing i386 entry. I have only found TWO ways of doing this. Way back when Longhorn was still in 4xxx stage, the installation would bloat because it would place an ultimate i386 folder(yeah that's the name!) directly under the Windows installation folder. 99.5% of all required files that can make a BartPE exist there. Pretty **** fancy...Just add setup information and it's ready to go. The other method I've discovered involves waking the setup without rebooting into Longhorn setup. We're all familiar with what Windows NT does when we invoke setup within windows and forget to reboot...We get a nice WINDOWS.~BT folder in the root directory ready for preinstallation. That folder, while it doesn't look like it, is in fact under the i386 order that we used to have on pre-NT6 installation discs. The only problem is the WINDOWS.~LS folder in the root that has the WIM file that contains the rest of the setup information. It brings you back to the first issue. So I guess that while it's too difficult to extract all the setup files without invoking use of an image utility, you can get your hands on a very handy WinPE. Which is going to be the only reason I would ever want to get ahold of a Vista release.

I just made a solid archive with PowerArchiver... ....................................... CabArc FTW! I didn't want to go through the annoying process of extracting everything and moving a lot of stuff around for testing, but I guess this works better.

BIN files annoy the crap out of me. If you're an archiver or you just like distributing large amounts of information over the LAN, you usually want just one package to look for. I don't like the whole BIN/CUE thing because they're two files. ISO FTW! The way I see it, ISOs are a more popular form of distribution anyway. You don't see Linux sites offering distros in a BIN/CUE mess.

I just use it to integrate what can't normally be put in and then I integrate the hotfixes manually. I don't see a lot of EXEs in SVCPACK so you're doing something weird. o.O' I shouldn't need a program for updating XP anyway. 2K was a ****ing b***h to update to October 2005 release, and XPCREATE did exactly what I needed it to. Only use these programs as a last resort...That's why they're here.

Pinfi only has the dependency of it being seen in memory. It doesn't need to be executed in order to infect the entire machine. It's one nasty little b***h. I wouldn't have had any luck getting rid of it if I booted WinPE on an infected machine either. I like what you're doing though. You're taking steps to eliminate a problem that has existed ever since Windows NT 3.5 and make a secure WINNT environment.

Are you sure those files are valid?

I agree with Aegis on this one....But you cannot change the truth here. The testers that are currently using Vista aren't catching the real bugs that we will inevitably worry about the next Tuesday, while the people that should be using Vista don't have the time to spend catching all these bugs. Such people should be paid to do this! It's pretty easy. o_O At any rate, I'll probably wind up switching to Vista as a primary development environment. When Vista is released, there will be vendors rewriting their program coding for maximum compatibility with Vista while they would still be worrying about the old "unoptimized" XP code. The real issue I see here is 32-Bit support. We won't be worried about support for old programs like VisiCalc and Quicken for Dos on a machine that has Vista installed. This is 2005 and will soon be 2006. Programs like this just don't belong on a modern computer. But those are 16-Bit applications. Vista really shouldn't be running on anything worse than a 32-Bit machine. Yet even as I type this, my little Intel 3.00E struggles while Vista is moving files around on a big 7200RPM SATA drive or simply grabbing my input. WTF is that?! o_O After Vista is released, the real issue is going to be when NTVDM stops running for 16-Bit apps and starts running for 32-Bit apps. 64-Bit machines are going to be the bottom-of-the barrel standard then, and it's already starting now. When we worry about our customized operating systems being "up-to-date," we're actually worried about any threat from outside our computers. This doesn't stop the threats that still exist in the system and worse yet, behind the keyboard. =/ I say screw WinVista(Oh crap! I'm already cutting letters out of the name! o_O) until it becomes a standard. I'm not making a jump to some new NT OS kernel just because it's "new" and updated. As soon as Service Pack 6 is released and Microsoft officially drops support for XP somewhere around June 30th of 2011...>.> The problem I see really isn't XP. It's the user. We currently have four flavors of Windows XP that are oriented towards either a home user or business user. The home business users quickly find out that a Home license won't do. Hopefully there won't really be seven flavors of Vista as originally stated, and there will be just one big package to keep everyone happy. If you want to argue with me and say XP is a problem, it's probably the fault of the user to begin with. However, we have issues of XP as a choice OS and users are losing control of their computers to things like spyware, viruses and other malware. In 2001, Windows XP was favored as the best OS of all time, and that quickly faded. Same thing is going to happen with Vista if it's released as scheduled. As much as I would really like a new OS with more features to migrate to, I would really like to see my current operating system(XP) fixed before said OS release. Running away from your problems is not a solution....As Microsoft quickly figured out with the blaster worm when I was still using Windows build 3718 back in 2002. o.o

Kekekekekekekeke! The challenge is bandwidth, and a mirror that likes to cut the program. **** *looks at 73MB archive* o_O *looks at 1.3GB extraction* O_O Pwned gee gee kay thanx no re.....x_X' ................................. Nice avatar. =/

That's just it. The executables are not immune to said virus. =/