troy

Hi all... I run a repair shop, and the Vista jobs are starting to pick up. Currently, for XP, I have an all-in-one CD that installs the proper OEMBIOS files for each vendor, bypassing the need to uninstall OEM garbage, applying service packs, etc... when using the original recovery media. I would like to do the same thing for Vista. Does anyone have any information on how to create a multi-boot DVD for vista that will allow me to install pre-activated versions of Vista (basic, premium, business, ultimate) for Royalty OEMs, generic OEM, retail, and upgrade versions? I've been searching both these forums and google, but the only information on this I seem to turn up, is how to exploit the SLP/SLIC thingies, which I do not want to do. I just want to be able to have a single DVD that I can use to restore OEM machines from Dell, GW, Asus, HP, etc... (as well as generic OEM, retail, & upgrades). Thanks,

All, I'm installing Vista Business on my Toshiba Satellite P25-S507, and everything went smoothly until I installed the nVidia drivers for the Go 5200 video card. Now, when the computer starts up, I get the funky green background image, but it never gives me a login screen. I can tap the power button to put the computer into hibernation, and when it comes out of hibernation, I get the login screen and everything works as expected until the next reboot. Anyone know what's causing this issue and how to resolve it? Thanks, -Troy

Yes, people have been complaining about it for a while now. http://www.google.com/search?q=ie7+iernonce+broken You can rename the v6 dll, but it won't be used unless you call it manually with RunDLL32, which is what we're doing for some things, but is useless for the startup process. BTW, check out v7's behavior... it's weird. It'll run, remove the values (title, flags) from the RunOnceEx key, but will not process any of the sub keys. If the format/syntax of the RunOnceEx registry entries have changed, that's fine, but I've been unable to locate any documentation so far.

Great work TC, I just got a good build of both Pro and Home using 1.0.4rc6. Tested both in VMWare without issue. However, I do have one request: can we keep the older version of iernonce.dll or find a way to emulate this behavior so that things can run from RunOnceEx on first boot? I have a few things, including .Net 2.0 some registry hacks that I really want to keep automated if at all possible. I suppose I can use that gui run thing to launch a script that will do what I need, but I'd rather keep it simple if I can. Much thanks!

Killgore, FWIW, I agree with you 100%. I too would like to see something to make it easier to maintain multiple sources. In my case (as indicated in another thread), I need both Home and Pro, SP2 only, but I need OEM, Retail, Upgrade, and possibly others for an all-in-1 CD. The only files to be taken into consideration, are the SETUPP.INI and TXTSETUP.SIF, and after editing 6 of them, I often find myself going back to double and even triple check to make sure I got all of them.

Yeah, I used the multiboot guides to create my setup. It's a very simple and easy process, but very tedius. My background in shell scripting on unix boxes tells me that much of this can be automated, but I do not have the experience with windows command scripting to make modifications to HFSLIP myself. In fact, I got a headache within about 2 minutes of looking at the source. I would expect that slipstreaming Home and Pro at the same would be a trivial excercise in repetition, as would creating muliple copies of each with seperate SEUTPP.INI files and copying over fixed versions of TXTSETUP.SIF files to the appropriate boot folders. Yes, this is an extension to what HFSIP currently handles, but I'd hardly call it bloat anymore than I'd call any of the other extended features bloat. I would agree, however, that the creation of the appropriate boot images and folders falls quite far from the scope of HFSLIP.

Ok, while working on my 7th or 8th HFSILP 6-in-1 CD, I'm trying to figure out how to simplify the process. The biggest time saver, would be to extend HFSLIP to look for PRO and HOME subfolders within the SOURCE folder, and to slip both at the same time, and skip the DRIVER.CAB options and automaticly create the SPX.CAB (otherwise, you can't fit into a single CD). (this would also be good for Windows 2000 folks) This would be more than enough, and I'd imagine it would be fairly trivial to implement (I don't write CMD scripts, so I really don't know). But, to take this a bit further, have HFSLIP look for a MULTIBOOT folder, which might look something like this: If found, HFSLIP would then create a similar directory structure under the SOURCESS folder, and: put the appropriate I386 folders in each generate an appropriate SETUPP.INI file for each put $OEM$ next to every I386 folder copy TXTSETUP.SIF to each of the appropriate boot folders with a fixed SetupSourcePath directive If we can at least get to the point of being able to slip multiple versions of the same OS at the same time, I'll send $20 to whomever. If we can do it all, I'll send $50.