Even though I have already indicated that I am open to replacing the verbiage, there's zero verbiage suggestions from the whiners
What do you think post #2 represents if not an accurate sum up of the events?
A queer way to describe the evolution of Doublespace, which could be summed up as:
Simon King was having some issues in booting 8.1 and he was missing some of the potentialities of Windows 8.x built-in tools, asked for help on the reboot.pro forum, some ideas were provided to him on reboot.pro and he included the provided ideas and the Open Source project wimlib http://sourceforge.n...rojects/wimlib/ (whose Author Sinchronicity also provided suggestions and support) in the DoubleSpace program, closed source, part of the Commercial package ZipMagic and in the still closed source, but freeware WinRE Extractor, released on reboot.pro: http://reboot.pro/topic/20325-updated-winre-extractor/
At least this is what seemingly happened here:
http://reboot.pro/to...fi-boot-issues/
Quick quotes (for those that do not want to read the given 10 page thread):
I have a very harrowing issue that I haven't been able to resolve for literally months...
...I really appreciate the scripts you have provided. Since Jaclaz assures me that the MSFT license is not an issue, I believe the cleanest approach for me right now is to interface with WAIK using the scripts you provided and through the InstallAware downloader in the setup wizard for the necessary WAIK components.
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Although, if I could fully retire WIMGAPI and use WIMLIB only; then it might become unnecessary too. Eric is doing a great job supporting the library, so that is really a big helping hand here.
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Hey, that's some helpful research, Misty!
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I am having some troubles on some other systems still; so please don't use this on a production environment unless you have a full backup - it is very much a beta, both on the DoubleSpace app side and the WIMLIB DLL side (I just got a new WIMLIB update from Eric, so I will add that in to the next build - maybe in the next hour or so, if I am lucky).
I confirm that WinRE is available, both on my current Surface, and my 32/64 bit virgin VMs. This is a hopeful development!
Can anybody share any newb-level instructions to create a new boot menu entry, booting from this WinRE instance? Something that I could type out with bcdedit, and also do programmatically?
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So tried the WIM file approach...took a copy of the WIM from my hidden partition, mounted it and added my tool inside it. Booted into the rescue mode through the Win 8.1 metro gooey options, and there it was, my tool was there. It also ran without apparent issues, so this approach is viable.
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You folks are right about MS's licensing policy change on PE, it appears they do not license it to ISVs anymore. So the only legal way to produce PE would be through having a copy of WAIK installed - we can optimize the installation process later, I just need something that works right now, so I can make progress on the project.
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Success! With the P replaced by R, I was able to boot in, at least inside VMware, to the recovery partition.
I'm going to try this on my live Surface now too, the one with the seemingly corrupted recovery partition.
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I ran the analyze command from WinRE.
Thanks for your winpeshl.ini suggestion, I will check that out as well. Hopefully I'll be able to use it to run my product, and with access to the desired partition - without laborious login processes.
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I also owe Wonko thanks for the WinRE idea, provided of course, that in further testing, it continues to prove viable. There's things you can learn from anyone, clearly
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That's actually a brilliantly simple idea. I suppose one wouldn't even need to use multiple WIMs or VSS for that - just leave the locked files uncompressed, right?
OK, it's done and working.
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Thanks again for all who have helped, sorted by the date of their contributions to the project:
Sinan Karaca of InstallAware, for the idea, and prototype code.
Eric Biggers of WIMLIB, for the late night troubleshooting help and excellent library.
Jaclaz/Wonko and Misty, for the WinRE idea and example batch files.
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OK, this bit has finally been sorted out: DoubleSpace now automagically preps a WIM file, and boots itself into it
I even just finished testing and validating WIMLIB on a Surface - no boot spinner rotation problem.
I believe any problem caused by seemingly random Surface corruption would surface immediately when trying to boot into the BCDEDIT menu entry that DoubleSpace creates. The process seems to stall there, so no harm can be done during further processing, thankfully.
I believe the project goals have been realized - a one-click, WIMBoot based, transparent full-disk compressor; which can utilize an external "Undo Disk" when available, but does not mandate one to be available. And can boot into itself without needing any USB stick, and/or manual/automated WinPE construction
Yep, that's right. It'll take any Windows 8.1 Update 1 installation, and WIMBoot it for you. Without needing anything extra - just the software. On average, it does double your disk storage. Really incredible! Eric has done a wonderful job implementing WIMLIB...I love his extra compression settings. Truly phenomenal.
Wonko