Summing up these last days experiences, I think we must re-formulate goals and expectations for this project.
We must "fork" it in two main development paths:
1) WinCLIBR (i.e.
Base
Recovery, based on first posted files from Dietmar.)
This with:
Mouse support
NTFS, FAT and CFDS support
Dos Navigator (about 1.5 Mbytes)
blackbox (about 300 Kb)
Swissknife (about 3 Mb)
A number of smallish utilities, say Nirsoft ones + various ones like MBRfix/MBrwiz and the like, say another 2 Mb
Can stay below 30 Mb, maybe 20, which is what I personally find as a reasonable size for this kind of build, having all the functionalities of the Recovery Console, but with a file navigator (VERY fast, NC-like)
and a graphical partitioning utility.
The missing step is a Registry manipulating utility, the excellent
Native Registry Editor by Dan Madden:
http://www.codeproje.../NtRegEdit.aspxhttp://www.codeproje...NtRegistry.aspxworks as a charm, I used the "VC++6.0" version as it was the most "compact one" with:
NTRegedit.exe 312 kb
aclui.dll 105 kb
Msvcp60.dll 393 kb
problem is, it still misses the Load/Unload hive capability, which is of course needed in Recovery Environment.
(I will try to contact Mr. Madden to see if he is interested in adding this feature)
Making default Registry Editor working is, besides rather difficult, incredibly space-hungry, unless I am mistaken, getting it to work adds to the build something like 17 Mbytes of related files and dependencies.
On the other hand, still below 100 Mbytes:
2) WinCLINL (i.e.
No
Limits based on second sets of files by Dietmar)
Same as above, with normal Regedit, full clipboard/OLE support, almost ANY app running or installable.
The great advantage of such a system as compared to the various PE based ones is that it is a writable system, thus you do not need to re-build, you just add applications (almost) the normal way. If an app does not work, you fire up Dependency Walker and/or Regmon/Filemon and add the missing file or Registry entry.
I have seen in these days that, as expected, once you have resolved the "base" dependencies for a number of programs, each subsequent one you try needs less and less work to be made working.
And of course here comes the request to
Dietmar (I know he is waiting for it and I don't want to disappoint him):
Can we have this thingy bootable from USB?
And one for
Euhenio,
Bilou_gateux or for anyone with experience with RamDisk:
Can we have this thingy bootable from Ramdisk using the Server 2003 SP1+ files?
jaclaz