Biohazard Xpe Project

[SiMoNsAyS]

INTRODUCTION

I've just finished my 2nd BartPE project. First one was only able to run a few commandline utilities plus nero under a NTFS environment, size was small (less than 250mb) so it could be the perfect recovering system. Problem came when I needed to access a SATA and/or SCSI drive... so second project started with this idea.

Built time (including burn process and Virtual PC tests) was less than 48h. I've used most the knowledge on this forum so I thought shown it will be a good idea.

FEATURES

*Built over my uA Windows XP SP2 Spanish

*XPize 3.0 integrated

*Hotfixes Up-to-date

*Default BarPE tools

*RAMDisk (which sets automatically its size depending on the system)

*BartPE XPe plugin and some others by Sherpya, including the hardware detector / driver installer

*Adaptec ASPI drivers

*DriverPack MassStorage (Oct 17 2004) by Bâshrat the Sneaky, so I'm able to access my Sil3112 SATA drive

*Unattended Codec-Pack 2.5 (Jan 18 2004) by swgreed, so I'm able to play most of all the common multimedia files including QuickTime, Real or DivX from BSPlayer, Winamp, WMP9...

*Omega 2.5.90 Video Drivers and Control Panel, able to play OpenGL games like Quake

*Creative Audigy Drivers, able to play a DVD movie with 5.1 sound

*Explorer shell fully working

*Multiple filemanagers. Explore2FS can access linux ext2/3 partitions; Winternals ERD 2003 explorer, registry editor, password recover...

*Some useful programs included, like ACDSee32, BSPlayer, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Nero, Office 2003 Viwers (Word, Excel and PP), Partition Magic 8 (floppy image to boot from and able to format/change any partition), UltraISO, Winamp (having problems with this because of read-only files, fully working if I copy the dir to the RAM disk partition), WinRAR, WMP 6.4 and WMP9.

*Customization from my uA CD. Regtweaks, wallpaper, oemlogo and oeminfo, logon, boot, shutdown dialog, start menu, quicklaunch and one of the things I'm most proud, custom icons for image, compression, burning, and multimedia files. All of the batch file windows are hidden by CMDOW.

*uA CD replacements are still present here, Notepad>Notepad2, Calculator>Microsoft Calculator Plus...

PROCESS

XPe boots without asking any user intervention. Loads textmode drivers including MassStorage so it will boot without problems on any SCSI drive supported by Bâshrat DriverPack (I suppose issues with his pack are present on my XPe).

Bootscreen loads and after some seconds main desktop is shown. nu2menu is now available

RAMDisk is autosized. Codecs start to register and associations and custom icons are set.

Here goes an important part, drivers are loaded with HWPnP, only for PCI\VEN and IDE devices. When all the drivers are installed (still without user intervention), video mode is set to 1024*768 (32Bit). It is supposed that new drivers present on SP2 like nForce drivers will be installed without problems, although I haven't had the oportunity to test it.

Regtweaks are imported plus Rightmenu entries. "Command Prompt Here" or "Open with Notepad" are now available.

XPe loads, services are started. Taskbar and Start Menu are now present.

Finally my custom shortcuts are extracted. Now everything is up and running.

This whole process takes a total of 10~12 mins to complete, most of it registering codecs (I suppose regserv32.exe needs to start some necessary services) and installing devices. The last 2 about 8mins.

CONCLUSION

I think I've finished achieving most of my start objetives plus a couple more

Some things to test: play some DirectX games that doesn't need advanced registry entries, password protect a folder on a NTFS filesystem to make it private and see "what happens" when trying to access it, encode a XviD movie to test how many time it takes...

It is easy to build your custom PE-XPe version, just take your time to find the necessary plugins.

Thanks to people from this forum that without knowing helped me much on building this

Edited March 14, 2005 by SiMoNsAyS

[SiMoNsAyS]

SCREENSHOTS

Top image is desktop after being loaded, explorer is running. Bottom left shows how hardware is being detected and drivers are installed. Bottom right is XPe plugin loading service and taskbar. Startup

Plain Desktop after everything is loaded.

Start Menu shortcuts.

nu2Menu.

Device Manager shows Omega Radeon and Audigy drivers plus SATA HD installed.

Multimedia applications; Winamp playing a song, BSPlayer, WMP9...

A few Applications up and running.

XPized paint, icons, wizards...

Shutdown dialog.

[mjc]

awesome... do you have a guide somewhere? =P

[SiMoNsAyS]

actually this is the only 'guide' available, i just followed the tutorials available at bart's pe website and/or plugins tuts

[Scubar]

Truly excellent. i would love to create something like that for myself. just wondering what font u used on ur desktop screenshot saying Windows XPE

[mls15000]

How did you get the explorer shell to work?

[SiMoNsAyS]

thanks for the interest

@ScubaSteve, font used were "Bachelor Pad JL" and "BankGothic Md BT"

@mls15000, that was simple, i just used the xpe plugin by sherpya

[JuMz]

K so wait, this is based off BartPE or WinPE?

You can have an explorer and a startmenu in these? I thought these were just Preinstallation Environments (hence the PE)? I am currently using WinPE to launch winnt32 for my unattended DVD...I can take this even further you mean?

[Scubar]

i havent started doing my PE cd yet but i was wondering if there would be anyway to use ur own visual styled taskbar like they have on ERD Commander.

[SiMoNsAyS]

@JuMz, Bart's PE

Yep, you can take it even further. The only problem I see is the size needed

@ScubaSteve, really probably. there must be a plugin for that but it must take a time to load the service and theme

[JuMz]

@JuMz, Bart's PE

Yep, you can take it even further. The only problem I see is the size needed

I understand you can take BartPE further but you can take WinPE futher (i.e. add a GUI with a desktop and start menu etc)

If so, how?

[totoymola]

Really nice Simon.

I haven't tried the Win XPE plugin, but it looks really nice. I will try to build another one. Mine is almost one year old! Wait, do I still need the nu2menu if I'm going to use the Win XPE plugin?

I really wonder how ERD Commander's theme works..

[SiMoNsAyS]

@JuMz, http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/, that's bartpe's homepage. look at plugins sections, i'm sure it won't take you much time to familiarize with them

@totoymola, technically you won't need nu2menu never more, i use it as a shortcut for my most used applications.

erd commander (hopefully) works flawlessly on my current setup

[Lost Soul]

@SiMoNsAyS

im still fairly new to the pe scene ive created a pe disk but its fairly basic,, can i ask how did you change your background,, im not sure where to go for that file ?

edit n/m i found some nice customizing info / tuts... thanks anyways

btw your setup looks gr8 its inspired me to keep working on this

Edited August 8, 2005 by Lost Soul

[SiMoNsAyS]

@Lost Soul, one of the .inf files of xpe plugins has info on how to change your wallpaper.

btw, it's nice that you found a solution, thanks for your comments