voltaic

ya, unfortunately the c# runtime is even bigger than the java one. i tried that code conversion utility (not by microsoft, by the way) and it did a pretty crappy job to begin with. like i said, i am going to take a c++ class so i can rewrite the thing, but until then, a 16MB footprint isn't too bad. enjoy! Voltaic [edit] this response really wasn't designed to be a flame, but as i read over it for the 2nd time, it kinda sounds that way, sorry!

[EDIT] the information on this reply is no longer relevant.

XtremMac: i have what most to consider to be the best computer speakers on the market. Klipsch promedia 5.1 ultras. it's the poor quality of the tv speakers that maskd the white noise of the dvd audio. yes, i've been through all of those cute little menu on the dvd and made sure they were set at the best possible choice for my configuration. you should probably ask before you go making assumptions and essentially calling someone an id*** because you think they are some newbie watching a movie on their emachines 14" monitor and the rinky dink speakers that came with it. You could really stand to be less of a di©khead. Crahak: it's mostly when the characters are talking quietly, or especially when there is quiet music playing, that's when i really notice it. the periods of silence are actually fine. -Voltaic

I don't normally watch DVDs on my computer, but i recently subscribed to one of those dvd rental services where they send them to your hose and have found myslef watching them on my computer more often. anyway, that being said, the speakers on my computer are quite a bit better than the ones on my tv and i find myself noticing quiet "white noise" coming through when the characters are speaking. has anyone else noticed this? DVDs are supposed to be the pinnacle of multimedia perfection, are they not? what gives? i mean, there is certainly the capacity for CD-quality audio, it just takes more space. so my assumption would be that if a person is willing to pay for a dvd, they are probably willing to pay the extra to have the thing in better quality on 2 dvds. what a gyp: companies too cheap to take full advantage of the technology that could facilitate home-cinematic perfection! and for what? worst case scenario it costs $1.87 per dvd total for DVD-9 in quantities of only 1,000! (according to prices on http://www.cdrom2go.com) -Voltaic

i thought signed files were binary files not text, or at least unreadable by humans. anyway, layout.inf is neither and certainly doesn't fit any of the criteria i know of a digitally signed file (being able to edit it without errors, beingable to read it without a special program.) anyway, after looking a bit closer it turns out that it is the dosnet.inf file that seems to have files leftover in it. i manually deleted a few of the entries that contained references to files that were deleted and never say an error message complaining about their absence. sorry for the confusion. -Voltaic

awesome, thanks! -Voltaic

VDubs (Voltaic's Windows Setup, "W" pronounced "dub") is a windows setup front-end i have been working on. it's finally stable enough that i can release a beta of it! only catch is that it's written in java because that's all i know right now. i'm going to learn c++ when i get a chance (in the next 10 months hopefull) and port it to c++. the good news is that i have included a batch file to decrease the footprint to only about 16MB. anyway, here are the features: any number of windows nt based installations any number of applications can selected/deseleceted and automatically installed. any number of tweaks can be selected/deselected and installed with Windows. specify all data to be used by windows installation up-front multiple application and registry tweak profiles can be selected for easy installation of a subset of your applications. [ 1.0b (Beta) ] * Initial Release [ 1.1b (Beta) – 9/21/04 ] * Fixed installation issue (install.cmd) which did not “unload” the setupreg.hiv file from the registry after modifying it. * Added “/syspart:c: /tempdrive:c:” to the winnt32.exe execution string. * No longer distributing Java Runtime with Vdubs because of storage requirements. (see readme for more info) [ 1.11b (Beta) – 9/21/04 ] * Fixed the issue about the reduce size.cmd, umm, just not working. Oops! More specifically, the 7zip program used to re-compress the runtime files was missing a dll resulting in no files actually being extracted. * Fixed more batch file probs: not correctly mounting the setupreg.hiv file. I'm a java programmer, not a batch file fiend [ 1.12b (Beta) – 9/22/04 ] * merged upgrade.cmd into install.cmd and added a menu to allow selection between the two. * added a section to install.cmd to automatically create a batch file to make your image for you. Note that it requires that you already have cdimage.exe somewhere on your hard drive. [ 1.13b (Beta) – 9/22/04 ] * fixed the command line to be executed as shell for Windows PE [ 1.3b (Beta) - 10/6/04 ] * added ability to have application and registry setting preset groups * added ability to "select all" and "select none" on application and registry tweak selection screens * added force restart feature via peshutdown.exe thanks to the (anonymous) author (http://home.t-online.de/home/520085154509) * added options to delete installation files upon completion of install * made windows setup restart and try again if exited with errorlevel > 0 * implemented verbose checkbox * added more defaults to defaults.ini * fixed more command lines within code * added a few cosmetic perks * fixed the issue where there would sometimes be a blank registry tweak in the list toward the top [ 1.31b (Beta) – 10/13/04 ] * fixed minor bug that would cause vdubs to enable a command for deleting installation files even if no applications were selected for installation * fixed another somewhat less minor bug that involves the syntax checking for tweaks. * added a feature to the install batch file to use a custom directory for vdubs files. * fixed a few other very minor bugs. * put all class and image files in a jar file instead of in a directory * updated the readme to reflect recent changes, fixed a few inaccuracies, improved readability of directory structure diagram [ RC1 – 10/21/04 ] *Fixed the syntax checking for registry tweaks. Everything should be fine now. <knocks on wood> [bugs Identified in RC1] *format does not work if drive has pre-existing label *a few remaining registry tweak checking issues basically just run the utility, pick what you want to install, put in your user info, and let it copy all the files. after that you can take your cd and walk away! I plan to maintain this and add some new features in the future. hopefully it gets popular like some of the other tools members have made. anyway, enjoy. i will be checking the boards for any questions, bug reports, etc. If for some reason i don't respond withing a few days to a post, just AIM me to get my attention. Screen Name: VoltaicSCA Download Voltaic's Windows Installer HERE! -Voltaic

the exact files were too many to remember, seemed like hundreds. the first one was 3dgarro.cur. it looked like every file that nlite removed caused an error. yes, after skipping them it did work, hoever, i'm using this in an unattended situiation, and would like not to have to hit skip that many times. thanks again. -Voltaic

right, i noticed dosnet is cleaned, the problem arises when using winnt32.exe to run setup in windows pe using the following: c:\i386\winnt32.exe /unattend:c:\i386\winnt.sif /syspart:c: /tempdrive:c: where c: is a drive to which i have copied the i386 dir of a specific windows distro. i'm no expert on windows installation process, but it's my understanding that text mode setup uses txtsetup.sif and that windows mode setup uses layout.inf. i could be wrong but the fact remains that when running setup from the aforementioned command it causes file not found errors when copying. anyway, i hope that clarified the problem a bit. -Voltaic

so am i just not seeing the option to do so, or does nlite not process layout.inf? when running windows setup in windows pe using winnt32.exe it gives errors about not being able to find files because the layout.inf file still has references to files that were removed by nlite. txtsetup.sif has all references to removed file deleted from it, but layout.inf still has 'em. argh! Help! Thanks! -Voltaic

i use netbeans and really like it. my only real gripe is with the gui layout part of it. something about how it handles default minimumSize maximumSize and preferredSize settings end up causing some serious headaches for me. anyway, other than that it's great and free. NetBeans

ok, well, if i can't run pe with the files compressed, i will uncompress the files that pe uses in the rest of my windows i386 type directories. here is a batch that you can use to do this yourself. just run it from the directory containing the i386 dir from windows pe (it must bear that name) and the rest of your windows xp ditro folders such as "xppro" "xphome" etc. it will prompt you to enter the name of the directory to expand files in; just enter it in relative path format. the code is easy enough to understand, but post if my explanation is poor. [edit] yay! i have a little star on my name now. how do you get those anyway? anyway, i did this and noticed savings of ~50-75mb. i didn't pay too much attention to what it was before. after actually paying attention to it, it saved 113MB. I guess that it is also worth noting that the pe files have to be the same versions as the xp files when using this batch file. expand_and_delete_duplicated_winpe_files.cmd

well ****! not the answer i wanted, but thanks! -Sam

i think you misunderstood the question. i want to have the files in the i386 directory of winpe be the same as those in the i386 directory of a regular windows cd. ie, i want the ones that CAN to remain cab compressed as in somefile.dl_ instead of a larger somefile.dll this accomplishes 2 things: first of all, winpe is just smaller in terms of raw numbers. additionally, since there are 2 copies of somefile.dl_ instead of 2 files which are dissimilar (somefile.dll and somefile.dl_) you get to only encode the somefile.dl_ file once thanks to cdimage's -o command line option so my question is/are: 1. is it possible for windows pe to boot from the compressed files, or is there a subset o the files used by windows pe that can remain compressed 2. if so, is there an easy way to do it?

well, windows pe is big, especially if you need more than just bare minimum functionality that you get after removing the "safe to remove" files list as provided by MS. i'd like to have cdimage only encode theose files once when i use the -o switch. also, does this make the boot time of pe dramatically slower? i know it will a little, but is it a lot? anyway, thanks. -sam

is it possible to boot windows pe with all of the files that come compressed on a regular winxp cd compressed on the pe cd. i notice that you can boot into text mode setup from a pe cd under certain circumstances by not specifying the /minint switch in the txtsetup.sif file, which is essentially the same thing as just booting the regular winxp cd (right?) anyway, there's my fragmented thoughts behind asking this question. anyone else actually know about this? -Sam

so after finally getting around to trying this, i noticed that after runninng the intitial winnt32.exe commmands there is what i consider way too much file copying going on. after issuing the command in winpe it copies files to the ~bt and ~ls directories, and then after rebooting back into text mode setup, copies the same files again. am i wrong here? is there something i messed up? i always thought that it should just skip text mode setup all together and just get on with the gui part right when the winnt32 command was issued.

just wondering if anyone has messed with microsoft's windows xp embedded studio. it seems pretty cool, basically like a full featured bart's pe builder that's actually intended to be used as a full features OS. anyway, it looks to have some potential, i'm curious what the more experienced MSFN members have to say about it. you can download a demo of it somewhere on M$'s website, it's fairly easy to find. -Voltaic

i seem to be having an issue with variables in my inf files when loaing them with the rest of the hives. setup does not seem to want to replace things like %01% with the directory that it should (it just leaves it as %01%) this is something that i have tested to work in windows, but when these inf files are loaded as hive files from the txtsetup.sif they dont. anyway, i noticed that even the rollup.inf that GOSH created for slipsreaming the security rollup that is loaded from the txtsetup.sif has references to numerical path name variables. given this fact, is there something i am doing that might case these variables not to be replaced? thanks for the help! -Voltaic

No, it seems like a case of copy protection that is so "good" that it causes problems. RIAA's cds that won't play in computers, you get the picture. i dunno, i could be wrong, but if i paid for a product i think i should be able to do whatever the hell i want with it short of distibuting it to others including making a unattended CD. anyway, i know that this is a non-piracy endorsing site, but i think that given the sircumstances i think that the following peice of advice is appropriate: if you are having the same problem (legit cd key not working), i would just scour the web until i found a cd-key that worked. i apologize if this needs to be/gets edited by the mods. -Sam

I have been having the same problem that has been mentioned several times in the posts in this topic, and it seems to be unresolved as of yet. i was thinking it may work to use your already put together unattended cd normally, except change the unattend mode to attended, and use the <shift> <F10> method to open a console during the gui mode setup. you could then get to one of setup's "stopping points" when the system is static (ie no changing around of files) and copy the files mentioned by gosh at the beginning of the topic to a different dir, and once everything is up and running you can copy those files to where they need to go. this is just an untested theory at this point, but does it sound plausible to you gosh? anyway, i'll give it a try and if i find that it works before someone knowledgeable has a chance to [hopefully not] debunk my idea, then i'll post my findings. -Sam [edit] Ya, it didnt work. nevermind. Just the same, is there anyone who knows why my windows cd suddenly wants a "volume license" when i run winnt32.exe /noreboot with the same key that i use for the autoinstall cd that i have used quite a few times. this is obviously a recurring issue that has yet to be fully addressed.

ok, i know people have been posting about raid drivers since the coming of christ, but this is a unique problem. first: i have no desire to integrate my scsi driver into my cd second: my scsi driver used to be (pre sp1 slipstreaming) integrated into the factory windows disk, and after slipstreaming sp1, it isnt. third: ok, no big deal, just use the driver from a floppy. wrong! the driver will load and allow you to select a HD from the raid controller, but once it starts copying files (still in text mode) it says it can't find hpt3xx.sys. it doesnt do this when installing to a regular hd, and it does do it regardless of raid controller and disk configuration (ie raid mode and disks in array). it does it on multiple systems. i even rebuilt my install cd making sure that i used only 8.3 filenames for all my folders in case that was the issue. happened again. if anyone can help, that would absolutely make my day. -Voltaic

the idea of using winpe as a diag utility seems sppealing to me, but i dont know if anyone has noticed yet, but most apps dont run in winpe. furthermore, i dont see that there would be enough benefit from spending the time to figure out how to install from it to make the whole thing worth it. i had to go through hell and high water just to get the pe builder since microsoft twisted barts arm about it, and then had to go through more to get any kind of utils that will run in it. i just dont see the benefit, however, if anyone has found any information contrary to this, i'm open. -Voltaic