Jump to content

Replacing Notepad.exe with Sc1


Recommended Posts

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.

----------

Post 2

----------

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.)

----------

Post 3

----------

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.)

----------

Post 4

----------

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.

<Edit>

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

</Edit>

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...