Open source WinUSB: the portable Windows !

[patchworks]

WinUSB is Windows Portable. WinUSB can install in USB Disks. Modified Windows 9x can install (minimum) 256 MB. Windows 95 with WinUSB supports NTFS, DVD's and more. Portable Modified Windows XP can install, too

SF.net project page

Official homepage (in Turkish !)

[Chozo4]

Sounds interesting overall but unless I'm missing something completely...

It's not really hard to install onto a thumdrive or any USB drive as long as your bios support's booting from USB. However, if it the bios doesn't support it but supports booting from a CD or floppy it will still work. I'd been working on a USB BootCD myself recently due to replacing my laptops hard drive with a usb thumbstick. It works just fine and supplies USB2.0 speeds through compatibility mode with a 4gb stick. Only drawback is that you cannot detect any other USB devices in windows it seems beyond what was there during the intial bootup (still trying to figure out a workaround for this).

note: They say 256mb minimum but.. I've installed even mindows (roughly 17mb size) without any issues on a thumbstick >.> the only thing I can see of this project is if it provides completely functional but generic drivers to support whatever system it's being run on.

For booting off a USB stick without bios support, you mainly need a plain bootdisk with:

HIMEM.SYS

IFSHELP.SYS (for Fat32/VFAT? support)

DBLBUFF.SYS (will be slowish without)

USBASPI.SYS (v2.20)

ASPIDISK.SYS

SMARTDRV.EXE (*)

XMSDSK.EXE (To copy all DOS command files to a ramdisk - reduces file queries from the stick)

XCOPY32.EXE (For copying to ramdisk)

... along with changing the DOS variables such as PATH and TEMP to tell it to look on the ramdisk and to put temp files on the ram disk as well.

*=Used to reduce queries to the thumbstick and reduce wear on the stick. Thumbdrives don't last forever due to supposedly limited I/O operations before the NAND flash wears out. So best to try to reduce the queries to the stick during normal use as much as possible while still allowing normal use and system changes.

Edited November 7, 2007 by Chozo4

[eidenk]

Patchworks are you aware that generally open source projects don't support 9x oses anymore ?

Examples : Gimp, Dia, Inkscape, Fillezilla, Scribus, Abiword.

Edited November 7, 2007 by eidenk

[oscardog]

Sounds interesting overall but unless I'm missing something completely...

It's not really hard to install onto a thumdrive or any USB drive as long as your bios support's booting from USB. However, if it the bios doesn't support it but supports booting from a CD or floppy it will still work. I'd been working on a USB BootCD myself recently due to replacing my laptops hard drive with a usb thumbstick. It works just fine and supplies USB2.0 speeds through compatibility mode with a 4gb stick. Only drawback is that you cannot detect any other USB devices in windows it seems beyond what was there during the intial bootup (still trying to figure out a workaround for this).

note: They say 256mb minimum but.. I've installed even mindows (roughly 17mb size) without any issues on a thumbstick >.> the only thing I can see of this project is if it provides completely functional but generic drivers to support whatever system it's being run on.

For booting off a USB stick without bios support, you mainly need a plain bootdisk with:

HIMEM.SYS

IFSHELP.SYS (for Fat32/VFAT? support)

DBLBUFF.SYS (will be slowish without)

USBASPI.SYS (v2.20)

ASPIDISK.SYS

SMARTDRV.EXE (*)

XMSDSK.EXE (To copy all DOS command files to a ramdisk - reduces file queries from the stick)

XCOPY32.EXE (For copying to ramdisk)

... along with changing the DOS variables such as PATH and TEMP to tell it to look on the ramdisk and to put temp files on the ram disk as well.

*=Used to reduce queries to the thumbstick and reduce wear on the stick. Thumbdrives don't last forever due to supposedly limited I/O operations before the NAND flash wears out. So best to try to reduce the queries to the stick during normal use as much as possible while still allowing normal use and system changes.

To reduce queries and wear, create a ramdrive copy system and user dat to it, allow enough space for their backups which will be created. The reg files will need to be altered to point to the ramdrive, export the registry file rename it to txt, open it in word and use find replace to point the registry from the old to the new ramdrive letter. Rename from .txt to reg rebuild your system and user dat files. This method works also for win9x on a cd , if you want to make it impossible for your system to become compromised via it being a read only media.

@patchworks thanks for the link, my download says corrupted archive in winrar, is it compressed in 7zip

[eidenk]

winusb2.zip is indeed corrupted. I have tried to download it from different servers and it is always the same.

I could not repair it with the tools I have.