PE Tool for creating patches

[discdude]

WildBill,

As a long-time lurker to this thread, I am amazed at your dedication to fixing bugs and extending the usefulness of Windows 2000.

Regarding KB2393802, I was wondering if it might be better to release two versions of this patch - one with bootskin support and one without. That way, people who run into problems (like tomasz86) can simply use the version without bootskin support.

I must admit that I've been too chicken to install KB2393802 on my computer even though I might finally get my ATI TV Wonder 750 working since you added KeAcquireInterruptSpinLock and KeReleaseInterruptSpinLock support. I think the only other XP-only command the driver uses is RtlGetVersion (maybe I can hex edit it to use GetVersionEX).

Thanks for your great work.

[WildBill]

The thought has crossed my mind, though I'd still like to try a little more to fix it once and for all. I've been out of action with a virus for the past week, hence the lack of updates (and I still have it -- physical virus, not a computer one). The time has allowed me to think about where tomasz's problem might be coming from. I put together this update which leaves everthing in place but circumvents loading bootskin settings:

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5l-x86-ENU.exe

Edited November 2, 2011 by WildBill

[tomasz86]

Unfortunately it still doesn't work It dies around 80%.

[DosFreak]

Are you guys doing any kind of debugging or is this just guesswork?

Example:

http://www.ndis.com/ndis-debugging/virtual/vmwaresetup.htm

[WildBill]

Unfortunately I can't recreate the problem so I'm trying to find it by eliminating potential causes. Here is another one that (1) removes the call to load the image from the registry, (2) removes the call to load the image from disk, and (3) puts in a small fix when setting up the image palette.

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5m-x86-ENU.exe

Edited November 4, 2011 by WildBill

[tomasz86]

No difference with c5m

[WildBill]

Ugh. Here's another that fixes a bug in parsing "NOGUIBOOT" and clears direction flags when messing with the palette (if they weren't already cleared that would be a big problem).

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5n-x86-ENU.exe

[tomasz86]

Ugh. Here's another that fixes a bug in parsing "NOGUIBOOT" and clears direction flags when messing with the palette (if they weren't already cleared that would be a big problem).

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5n-x86-ENU.exe

It's still the same

[WildBill]

(sigh)

I went through all of the bootskin code and revamped how I deal with the stack -- except for two particular routinea, this one takes a minimally-invasive approach instead of saving everything in sight.

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5o-x86-ENU.exe

Edited November 5, 2011 by WildBill

[tomasz86]

No positive effect unfortunately

So it's the bootskin support that causes all these problems right? The last version that worked was the one with no bootskin support implemented yet. Is it correct?

It's just a wild guess but maybe there's something different with Win2k Pro and Server in this field? On the other hand, it runs fine under a VM so it's unlikely...

[dencorso]

Sorry, I think I lost myself by reading this thread too little. And many other may be feeling like I do. Are you positive the problem is caused by the bootskin code added?

[WildBill]

It happens when I enable all of the bootskin support, but the problem has been tracking down the exact cause.

For this test, I went all the way back to c5c since that was the last one that worked (it didn't have the bootskin code hooked in). This one hooks just one tiny piece in (actually just a helper routine, not really bootskin related). Maybe I can connect the bootskin stuff one tiny piece at a time until it fails. For now, I'm only going to update ntkrnlmp.exe since that's the one that tomasz uses.

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5c2-x86-ENU.exe

Edited November 6, 2011 by WildBill

[tomasz86]

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5c2-x86-ENU.exe

It works

By the way, just to add something positive...

Word 2007 works "out of the box" with your kernel installed (Excel & PowerPoint 2007 work with BWC kernel v5 too but Word doesn't).

and I've been trying to do something with IE7 but it doesn't look very well yet.

Edited November 6, 2011 by tomasz86

[WildBill]

Wow! Makes me tempted to buy a copy of O2k7...I'm still using O2k.

Here's another very tiny step. Just moving some instructions around to their final positions:

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5c3-x86-ENU.exe

[tomasz86]

Windows2000-KB2393802-v1-early-c5c3-x86-ENU.exe

It works

Wow! Makes me tempted to buy a copy of O2k7...I'm still using O2k.

I also want to try Office 2010 too but I can't get the thing install here. It's a trial version but I don't think the installer of the proper one is different... so I'll probably have to install it in other 'supported' system and copy files to Win2k manually.

Edited November 6, 2011 by tomasz86