Replacing Notepad.exe with Sc1

[scmartindale]

I'm creating an unattend XP disk, manually. Basically, I'm only trying to slipstream updates and stick and answer file on the disk, nothing special.

I do, however, want to replace notepad with SciTE (http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTEDownload.html).

I expect that I could do this by replacing Notepad.exe with the "Sc1" distribution of SciTE - a single-file application, but I'm not sure that it would work, for two reasons:

1 - I'm not sure how I would replace Notepad.exe with Sc1. I expect that I'd have to rename Sc1 to notepad.exe and compress it to notepad.ex_ and replace that file on the disk. Is this correct? If so, what tool do I use to do the necessary compression?

2 - I think windows will moan if I do 1, although notepad may not be considered a critically important file, so it may be allowed. If it will not moan, that's good. If it will, how do I prevent it from moaning?

Please suggest a course of action/investigation.

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Post 2

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Umm... I've changed my mind. I'm actually going to do this with Notepad2, which is also available in a UPX compressed distribution.

I'm still looking for help.

I've found this blog article: http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/2004/04/30/124093.aspx

It describes how to exclude notepad from WFP *after* windows has been installed.

In theory, all I have to do is exclude notepad from WFP on the windows disk and replace i396/NOTEPAD.EX_ with a compressed version of notepad2. (Please shout if I'm going wrong here.)

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Post 3

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Now, I did find the MSFN unattend guide's notes on disabling WFP altogether. (http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/66/). This is NOT what I want. I only want to exclude notepad.exe from WFP.

My thought process: %windir%system32Restorefilelist.xml (read Omar's blog) must come from somewhere on the CD. If I can find it on the disk, I can edit it... I think. If I look on the disk, I can't find it in i386/System32/.. That's not helpful.

But wait - what are these i386/FILELIST.DA_ and i386/FILELIST.XM_. They look interesting. If I could decompress them, I might be able to find out what they really are...

Darn. Stumped again by this compression thing. I'm still looking for help.

(I apologise for the stream-of-conciousness nature of this thread.)

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Post 4

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The saga continues...

I found the Windows CABinet SDK. That's cool. It contains "extract" and "makecab" (aren't these supposed to be bundled with Windows?)

Anyway, I extracted FILELIST.XM_ and found a FILELIST.XML that WinDiff determined to be identical to the one mentioned in Omar's blog. I extracted FILELIST.DA_ and received FILELIST.DAT. I'm not sure what that's for.

I'm sort of hoping that I can extract FILELIST.XML, modify it (using the instructions from Omar's blog) and compress it again with MAKECAB, then put my modified FILELIST.XM_ along with my NOTEPAD.EX_ (which will actually be a compressed Notepad2) on the disk.

Does anyone know whether this will work?

Please don't say that FILELIST.DA_ is important or that FILELIST.XM_ will be checked for tampering.

Or, if you do, please suggest an alternate route.

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Posts merged; please use the edit button to append data without intervening responses

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[Kelsenellenelvian]

Here is the best aternative I personally think you can get.

It is an nLite addon (you add it into the hotfix section)

[scmartindale]

My method worked. I now have Notepad2 (and the Powertoy Calculator from Microsoft) instead of the default Windows applications.

I didn't try the nLite plugin. I do not want to use nLite, I've had problems with it, in the past.