29 replies to this topic

[Brain Freeze]

After finally finding just the right setup I was wanting for Windows XP SP3 using nlite and other methods of tweaks, changes and additions then I was referred to this site as I was looking to run my now perfected/modified version in a ramdrive from a DVD. I have spent months looking over posts, tutorials before my now first post.

I am after the following: image this real running XP with the firadisk driver already installed and make it load off of my DVD into a ramdrive approximately 4 gig in size.

Now I've found a lot of variations but after trying to sum them all up and making attempts myself then I admit I failed drastically. There were a lot of comments saying this was easy and I figured I could do it on my own but now I am asking. How exactly can this be done as I feel I am doing no more then running around in circles in my many attempts.

For instance: to make an image, I believe I saw like 5 or more ways to create one like per say http://www.boot-land...?showtopic=9033 which sounded nice until I searched for the file and it was missing. hddimage04.zip and hddimage05.zip where there but hddimage06.zip (the newest and fixed) wasn't.

Another topic, is Grub4Dos required to make a DVD loading of XP for a ramdrive? And if so are the files to load Grub4Dos supposed to be inside the image of XP or outside?

One thing I have learned is now I understand how it feels to be at the learning end of computers as I have worked on them for a great many of years but wasn't good at teaching what I know and now I know why.

If anyone would be gracious enough to give me the straight of exactly what I'm after it would be greatly appreciated. I guess my software skills aren't as good as I had once thought. This is just more proof that your never to old to learn more.

[oriensol]

Uploaded file to mediafire and provided link for hddimage in first post: http://www.boot-land...?...c=9033&st=0

[dog]

are the files to load Grub4Dos supposed to be inside the image of XP or outside?

Outside, and I'd try a smallish ramdisk before a 4GB one.

[Brain Freeze]

First off my thanks goes to oriensol for fixing your link. I did use your script/software after defragging the original windows and I did not get any errors so I guess the image is good to go so far. I'm positive after looking over the site that it saved a lot of time and efforts.

I then went to installing grub4dos installer gui and that also seemed to go well with no errors. So I created my menu.lst as follows:

title Load Windows XP Professional (Ramdisk) find --set-root --ignore-floppies /ramxp.imgmap --mem /ramxp.img (hd0)map --hookroot (hd0,0)chainloader /ntldr

included ntldr, grldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini which includes the following:

[Boot Loader]Timeout=20Default=C:\grldr[Operating Systems]C:\grldr="Start GRUB4DOS Menu"

saved the changes and rebooted with the usb in place and grub4dos loaded up, pressed Windows XP Professional and it stalled so I assumed the file was to big so I used Gzip as I noticed in other posts before and changed my menu.lst from xpram.img to .gz and rebooted and got Error 17. I also want to make note that I tried this from usb to test my creation before figuring out how to put it all on cd or dvd.

As to dog's reply, I just want to say thanks for your input but I did this during the morning hours into the afternoon and didn't get back to read your post. I would like to ask why for the benefit of learning if I may as I do respect experience.

If anyone else has helpful comments please feel free to reply as I'm all ears.

Edited by Brain Freeze, 12 November 2010 - 01:07 AM.

[Wonko the Sane]

If anyone else has helpful comments please feel free to reply as I'm all ears.

The image, gzipped or not is EXPANDED into memory.

If it is a 4 Gb sized images it will need 4 Gb of RAM.

How much RAM do you have?

How much of it is accessible under XP?

With all due respect, you are confusing the goal with the method.

Tell us what is your final goal (which is NOT loading to a ramdisk 4 Gb in size but probably running XP from an image).

It is both pointless (and exceptionally slow) to load the WHOLE, monolithic image to RAM through grub4dos.

It is strongly advised to divide the image in a small "booting" partition and another one to be loaded later, provided that you have enough accessible RAM for doing so (which I personally doubt).

Most probably you can have an even more "segmented" setup, with a small "booting" drive (that goes to Ramdisk), and more than one other drives that can be loaded to Ram or accessed from the device.

For this latter approach a USB stick or hard disk would be better, as on CD/DVD you would need a FBWF or EWF, additionally.


Wonko

[Brain Freeze]

With all due respect, you are confusing the goal with the method.

I definitely respect your candor and I believe you are right, I did loose sight that I should image only XP itself instead of allowing extra space like an original XP install. For some reason I think I did that out of repetition of fixing computers over the years? I do feel awkward at this moment but my many thanks for your insight. I will definitely slim my XP image into something a lot smaller.

As to the CD / DVD method of loading, I do have method for my madness as either of the two allow for the files to be final and not written to again and that is definitely a primary goal in my circumstance. As we all know anything put on USB can be overwritten even with password protecting/encrypting if you have the knowledge and/or software.

As to my laptop memory I have 4 gig so even if I would have loaded the image with the memory I wouldn't have had anything left to run it with ............. also a very good point I neglected to notice. I guess I didn't put enough thought into this like I had intentionally thought. Normally I put to much thought into things and mess it up that way. :-) Guess I was way to eager with the new toy? :-)

Now after giving it a lot more thought, I want something close to 1 - 1.5 gig with installed software included in XP imaged plus the idea of a second partition to be loaded later approximately 500 MB to 1 G ran by method of ramdisk from CD/DVD would be great. I'm no rocket scientist but I'll bet that sounds a lot more realistic. :-)

My hat goes off to you Wonko the Sane

Again, anyone wants to add anything please feel free as I am always all ears and willing to learn!

Now I know what I want, exactly how would I make my initial image of XP with another seperate drive to be loaded later. I know how to make an empty image but how would I make it show automatically each time my XP image loads?

Edited by Brain Freeze, 12 November 2010 - 04:45 PM.

[Wonko the Sane]

Again, anyone wants to add anything please feel free as I am always all ears and willing to learn!

And what if we go back and have a "monolithic" image and take the RAM out of the equation?

http://www.boot-land...?...8804&st=246

Problem might be if you qualify as "advanced user" .

Still, for testing, the smallest image you can make, the better.


Wonko

[Brain Freeze]

Uploaded file to mediafire and provided link for hddimage in first post: http://www.boot-land...?...c=9033&st=0

oriensol,

First off thanks for the link fix and second after testing my image I found out that it error 17'd out so I figure I didn't construct the image correctly. I'm not sure what I did wrong but I tried constructing from inside the windows and from a different os from command prompt with the hddimage.cmd using hddimage.cmd "X:\my disk.img" 1500M /R with the installed XP being loaded on (C: drive) 2GB partition (1.95GB) with both made images being saved to a pen drive as not to effect the image being made. Also let me say that the used space on the C: drive is 980MB. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

[ps2_hacker]

I did this. I started with a tiny-xp install I prepped with usboot, so it can run from a usb attached hard drive, and applied the write filters from the embedded version, so that way it will run in ram, and it wont burn out my flashdrive when I use it that way. I made the system fit into 256mb, and made an image that I can boot via grub and memdisk. There is a program I used successfully called "diskless angel", that works for running from ram, too.

[Brain Freeze]

Ok I finally got my image to boot and run from the usb drive after shrinking my initial install of XP. I had a feeling my initial image was not right so I went another method and used a freeware program called selfimage to create the image file. The part I am still unhappy with is I still haven't learned myself how to create one on my own but after I have finished my build I plan on getting alot better understanding.

At this point I am a bit confused as when I had my first image and gzipped (4G image) it compressed to a file size of like 60k and now that I have a real working image (1.5G image) using the gzip -9 command it only compresses to 600M. So my question is has anyone else ran into this problem? I know I'm new to this program but there's really not much to it from what I read from the makers site and my other attempts.

I was expecting something like a 15k image so it would load alot faster as the 600M image loads almost equal to the orriginal image.

[Wonko the Sane]

Comeon, get real, man : you CANNOT compress 1.5 Gb in 15K!

Well, maybe the KGB compressor or one of the non-existant fractal transformers may, but it would take forever to uncompress.

Look:

Simplified:
1
1,000= 1K
1,000,000= 1M
1,000,000,000=1G

15,000 <-that's 15 followed by 3 0's (three zeroes)
1,500,000,000 <- that's 15 followed by 8 0's (8 zeroes)

the ratio between compressed and uncompressed is same as 1/100000 or 0.00001 or 0.001%.
compression ratio being 1-0.00001=0.99999 or 99.999%

As you can see here:
http://www.maximumco....com/index.html
http://www.maximumco...om/data/exe.php
http://www.maximumco.../summary_mf.php
the maximum you can expect from the best compressors available is around 80%

gzip rates in the above, respectively, as 55.24% and 63.69%

1,500,000,000*(1-0.5524)=671,400,000
1,500,000,000*(1-0.6369)=544,650,000

So, your results are perfectly normal.

Quite obviously, the 4 Gb to 60K was NOT a valid result.


Wonko

[Brain Freeze]

[quote name='Wonko the Sane' date='Nov 22 2010, 10:18 AM' post='114464']
Comeon, get real, man : you CANNOT compress 1.5 Gb in 15K!

Quite obviously, the 4 Gb to 60K was NOT a valid result.

Wonko the Sane, actually none of the numbers or in this case estimates of numbers were real, it just seemed to me that the larger 4 gig image compressed into alot smaller image file then the one that I am using now. Who knows maybe it was the wrong thing to ask here? This is a new learning experiance for me as I never truely worked on the software end of computers besides for adjustments to windows. All of these softwares/scripts and idea's are new to me as that is why I am trying to learn something new. I am definatley gona have to make another 4G image though and compress it as I know I am older but I can't be loosing my mind yet. Maybe it had something to do with all the unused space in the larger image? Never gave that much thought? Who knows. Reguardless sorry for my generalized question and thanks for your input.

[Wonko the Sane]

Maybe it had something to do with all the unused space in the larger image? Never gave that much thought? Who knows. Reguardless sorry for my generalized question and thanks for your input.

Yes, of course, an empty BIG image will compress to next to nothing, but the general idea, when doing a RAMdisk kind of booting is to "fill-the-image-up-to-the-brim".

An EMPTY image compresses nicely, examples:
http://bootcd.narod.ru/images_e.htm

But if your 4 Gb image contained, say, 1 Gb of data and programs, you cannot expect anything below 400 Mb.

Just FYI, the KGB archiver (nice results , but almost pointless ):
http://kgbarchiver.net/

JFYI:
http://www.boot-land...p?showtopic=994


Wonko

[Sha0]

The general outline that I use is:

• Install Windows XP to a partition on a real HDD, preferably on a platform with the least number of devices in Device Manager which are not supported out-of-the-box by the Windows installation source. That is, it's nice to have all devices installed by the Windows-included .INFs.
• Install a driver such as WinVBlock or Firadisk.
• Customize the image: Strip unwanteds, get a nice user experience ready, install programs, add drivers for various network and storage adapters, etc.
• Add HALs and kernels and a BOOT.INI so that you can make your HAL and kernel choice on any hardware[1].
• Capture the HDD as a raw (sector-by-sector) image file: So many ways to do this. DD, strarc, Volume Shadow Copy, simple file copy, and more... It depends what you're comfortable with and whether or not you are booted from the very OS you wish to capture.
• Consider contiguity of the image file if you wish for non-RAM-disk operation.
• Now your image is ready to be booted with GRUB4DOS or MEMDISK.

[1] Porting Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 to New Target Hardware via SAN-Booting : HAL & Kernel

[L A M A]

Talking about Capturing the HDD, The solutions you mentioned can monitor raw disk changes right? so, can it allow users to make changes "permanent" at custom time? by prompting user upon (restart || shutdown)??

If a user can manually press a button to make changes permanent its great instead of constant sector-by-sector copy. For example, I can install new software and if i don't like it, a simple restart kills it but if i want to make it permanent, i press a button and the software remains after restart. IMG_XP_Update.exe partially solved it, but when softwares are updated/deleted IMG_XP_Update.exe messes up by either (not overwriting) or (not deleting when uninstalled)

[dog]

can it allow users to make changes "permanent" at custom time?

I've used vshadow and robocopy to update a disk image on HD from the image in ram - it's in the winvblock thread.

[Brain Freeze]

Yes, of course, an empty BIG image will compress to next to nothing, but the general idea, when doing a RAMdisk kind of booting is to "fill-the-image-up-to-the-brim".

Now I feel this is a valid question to ask. While everyone knows that windows expands and contracts with log files, cache and so on as the list is long then I was totally unaware that an image should be built completely full as even my 1.5Gb image I'm using now has room left (500Mb) to install programs for experiments plus the expansion of windows while leaving it run for periods of time without rebooting. What are the benefits or the purposes of "filling it to the brim" as it would seem to me that windows would lock up and become unstable if ran for any period of time. Are you using another drive created to store this other information and if so what are the benefits?

[dog]

Are you using another drive created to store this other information and if so what are the benefits?

You can use another ramdisk to store large stuff - the advantages are that a smaller bootable image will load to ram quicker, and may allow use on a wider range of kit if some have less ram.

[Brain Freeze]

You can use another ramdisk to store large stuff - the advantages are that a smaller bootable image will load to ram quicker, and may allow use on a wider range of kit if some have less ram.

The smaller image = faster boot I totally understand however the concept of booting two images instead of 1 is loosing me unless the last image might be loaded inside of windows after the initial boot and if that were the case then I guess I have a lot more reading to do as I think I missed it while discovering the initial ramdisk idea.

Now this is all starting to make better sense as I was wandering why a lot of people weren't using the simple software I used to make images as we all know windows will not install on particians smaller then I believe 1.2Gb. And the software I used only images the whole partition, not removing free space.

* one tip I can share over this learning experience is an easy way to create an image (outside of windows) without making a second windows install is to use a program such as active boot disk (Live CD) and install your favorite imaging software in it.

So I guess it's time to go back to scratch and find an imaging software/script that isn't to difficult for this old man to grasp or find a script to remove free space in my already working image.

Edited by Brain Freeze, 23 November 2010 - 05:58 PM.

[Brain Freeze]

I have now created a "image to the brim" so to speak and works fine from the usb so everything is pretty much just what I expect, now my question is just how do I set windows up to create another blank drive once booted. Do I create a blank image of the size I want and just run commands after it's fully open all the time? If so that would seem to be a pain as it seems a script might work in this instance and what is recommended for a 4 gig with my image being 1 gig without being gzipped.

And yes I know my image is still big to those of you who want just the basics but I'm totally happy with putting up with the boot up period in trade off for my much preferred software. Another topic I yet to understand is if xp being maybe 1/6 of the size of windows 7 and everyone is going nuts on size of image then what is the expected size of an image of 7 supposed to be? Sounds as if it could only be ran off a newer desktop with a pile of memory to me at this point.

And of course my last final question is how would I go about going from usb to cd/dvd with my final project. If anyone has any input for any of these questions please feel free to jump in with their comments and/or suggestions as I'm always willing to learn what I'm capable of.

Happy New Year
Brain Freeze

[Wonko the Sane]

Can you expand on "creating another blank drive" ?

Which kind of drive?
Another RAMdisk one?
Or one on any writable media?


About CD/DVD , I don't get it.
I mean what are you having now?
A "completely in RAM - loaded-in-protected-mode-with-memdisk-or-grub4dos" build or "something else"?
If you describe in details WHAT you have right now it may help in suggesting you a way to put it on CD/DVD.

Just for the record, a nice way to run on CD/DVD is this other project:
http://reboot.pro/3890/


Wonko

[Brain Freeze]

Sorry for my lack of information, guess I forget how long it's been since my last post. My project being to create a pure ramdisk of XP loading off CD/DVD so it can't be monkeyed with/modified later. To which I have completed a usb version however it was earlier said that I should use a smaller xp image then later after boot up add an additional separate ramdisk for free space due to speed reasons. I'm not sure this is what I want but since this is about learning then I figure why not at least see it.

What I have now is a working 1GIG ramdisk (Non g-zipped)image of a true xp sp3 and extra's running off of a usb. Now my gut tells me that I would create a data cd/dvd depending on space used from usb and make the disk bootable. Now if this be the case then I know how already. The thing that makes me think different is that grubfordos setup.

(Special Note:) Wonko, I have to give recognition to you as you have been there to answer alot of questions on a regular basis and for that I just want to give a special thanks for your tolerance and patience in helping guide me though this process. You are definitely one that makes this site what it is today.

[Wonko the Sane]

The essential traits of Wonko's character are:

• he is generally trying to help
• he is usually grumpy (often very grumpy)
• he likes being flattered (but that doesn't change his grumpy attitude)

You do realize that you didn't provide ANY additional info in your last post?

So to remain coherent wiht the character:

WHICH §@ç#ing kind of image are you using a "base" and that is later loaded to ramdisk?
Like:

• HD image (with MBR and partitioned)
• superfloppy image (without MBR and NOT partitioned)
• .iso image

WHICH filesystem is used on it?
WHICH ramdisk driver are you using?
WHICH grubfordos grub4dos "setup" are you babbling about?

ALL of the above questions have been already asked you (nicely ):

Can you expand on "creating another blank drive" ?

Which kind of drive?
Another RAMdisk one?
Or one on any writable media?


About CD/DVD , I don't get it.
I mean what are you having now?
A "completely in RAM - loaded-in-protected-mode-with-memdisk-or-grub4dos" build or "something else"?
If you describe in details WHAT you have right now it may help in suggesting you a way to put it on CD/DVD.

How the HECK do you think we can read your mind or know from a distance WHAT the HECK are you currently playing with if you don't post the details?

Check the "common sense advice" attached to Rules:
http://reboot.pro/in...tion=boardrules

particularly points #d and #f.

Crystall ball is again in the shop for tuning, cannot find my tarots and the I-Ching was eaten by the dog, I have really no way to know what the heck you are doing unless you describe it.


Wonko

[Brain Freeze]

Well here's a side I haven't seen on here yet. Maybe things aren't as I first imagined after all. To set the record straight, no where have I indicated I was a professional software engineer so pardon me for not offering specifics, it's a good thing I don't treat my students in this fashion as I certainly wouldn't have a job to return to.

I used the latest of:
faradisk
grub4dos
IMG_XP

So obviously my base is a HD image =(.img) (with MBR and partitioned)

Next time ask for specifics and a list if that is what you want, remember I am a student on this board. Not to mention this is the first board I've used.

[Wonko the Sane]

So obviously my base is a HD image =(.img) (with MBR and partitioned)

Good.

Now, my (young ) padawan, what filesystem is the partition formatted with?

You see, if by any chance it is NTFS, you could use another filedisk kind of driver, like VDK, MS VSS, IMDISK or filedisk itself, to mount another image to a mountpoint in the filesystem.

You may notice how the question:

WHICH filesystem is used on it?

has been actually asked but you failed answering it.

BTW "latest" implies that your "teacher" should check himself the actual versions of what you used and probably get a wrong one, isn't it simpler to say "firadisk 0,x.y" or grub4dos 0.4.4 and actually post the way you are loading the image (grub4dos "setup", actually contents of your menu.lst)?

JFYI, it is possible (unless you are in a Commercial environment) to "nlite" the source and have a much smaller "base" image.


Wonko