595 replies to this topic

[windrv]

In fact, I do have "universal booting solution", though it's going to be available commercially (cheap).
BTW, you would never imagine, how much efforts are needed to transform something that already works into software product .

So would you give it out as free lunch as people would like to have it?

[was_jaclaz]

Booting issues are complex and tricky. Don't expect to overcome them in the near future

It's nice to receive encouragement and support from friends.

Jaclaz, since Alexei has kindly provided a solution for the 4th step on the needed capabilities list that you've described - and since we have all other steps pratically covered - would you mind creating a new topic (perhaps in boot methods, Windows XP/2003 or wherever you find more appropriate) with a proper opening topic so that we can continue our talks about this matter?

Will do, happy you are in the game.

I'll start immediately to put together some of my (alas terribly mixed up ideas and scratches).
Since next week I will be in vacation, one week with no work, no internet and no telephone, I might be able to do some good basic work.
Expect the start of the new thread, with (hopefully) all needed things by May 24th.
In the meantime, you could print (and study) these documents:
http://thestarman.pc...r/DiskTerms.htm
http://thestarman.pc.../DiskTerms2.htm
http://thestarman.pc.../PartTables.htm
http://thestarman.pc...m/mbr/FDISK.htm
http://thestarman.pc...mbr/FDISK98.htm
http://thestarman.pc.../mbr/STDMBR.htm
http://thestarman.pc...br/95BMEMBR.htm
http://thestarman.pc...br/Win2kmbr.htm
and of course this:
http://home.graffiti...B/USBstick.html

So that we can use the same terminology and tools.....


@all

I may be a bit optimistic , but today is a wonderful day to start a new project , the sun is shining, and I am confident that in a few weeks we can have something that is working.
Of course, as always, we will need a number of people willing to test the app and report.



jaclaz

[Nuno Brito]

Thank you - I was in fact going to ask for some related documentation, will surely give good use to my printer..

[Alexei]

Alexei @ May 8 2007, 12:59 PM
In fact, I do have "universal booting solution", though it's going to be available commercially (cheap).
BTW, you would never imagine, how much efforts are needed to transform something that already works into software product

So would you give it out as free lunch as people would like to have it?

With deep regrets, but "no free lunch today"
Here is why (if anybody interested):
- I spent way too much time looking for the solution (it was kinda personal challenge).
- After about 2 years of I came up with solution.
- Implementation was really .
- The solution was tested and reworked.
- To make it a product I had to write diagnostic, installation, and support utilities.
- To make utilities small I developed GUI support from scratch.
- I spent significant $$ bying USB drives, motherboards, etc. I bought domain.
- I've never to anybody.
- It's gonna be some freeware stuff as well (for ex. NTFS formatting from XP/2K3).
- I already noticed one guy who sells just USB formatting utility for about $50
Let's suppose I'd decided to make it freeware from the very beginning:
- I'd never found motivation to write detailed documentation.
- I'd never found motivation to write utilities and make them user friendly.
- The idea would be grabbed and published by GNU-guys
- 3rd party commercial software (with nice docs and pretty utilities) would follow
- Finally, all that would result in poorly written overpriced software with internet activation and other BS


Alexei

PS
That's gonna be published on USB-BOOTING.COM
(preliminary version):

We strongly believe that best protection
for the software is reasonable pricing.
We set our price very low in hope users
would prefer paying small amount for
legal copy to dangers of surfing warez.

We decided not to cripple our code
and leave it "universal". That's more
convenient to our customers, but makes
it easy to steal. We consider satisfaction
of our customers be more important
then protection of our profits.
If you somehow obtained a stolen copy
of our software and it worked for you,
please buy your own legal copy.

Copyright© Alexei Chipovalov 2007

[was_jaclaz]

- The idea would be stolen and published by GNU-guys

Are you sure the above is what it seems (i.e. an open accusation plainly stating that the "GNU-guys" are thieves)?

Possibly you might want to rephrase or however explain the above undoubtedly severe statement, which I personally find utterly unmotivated and highly offensive to both the addressed category and to the traditional "friendliness" of this board.

jaclaz

[phox]

Possibly you might want to rephrase or however explain the above undoubtedly severe statement, which I personally find utterly unmotivated and highly offensive to both the addressed category and to the traditional "friendliness" of this board.

jaclaz

I join you in this protest!

[Alexei]

Are you sure the above is what it seems (i.e. an open accusation plainly stating that the "GNU-guys" are thieves)?

Possibly you might want to rephrase or however explain the above undoubtedly severe statement, which I personally find utterly unmotivated and highly offensive to both the addressed category and to the traditional "friendliness" of this board.

jaclaz

1)
Not any open-source freeware is GNU. There are a lot of other licenses.
I don't really appreciate GNU ideology. They state "free not as free bear". I personally prefer "free bear"
If somebody begins selling the bear you gave him for free, what would you say? - Sorry, no free bear for you anymore
Though MS should be excluded for the sake of "robbing the rich to provide for the poor and fighting against injustice and tyranny" See http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Robin_Hood
2)
Often stealing an idea is not a crime, it's just unethical.
You can't reliably protect an idea unless you don't share it.
3)
"Steal the idea" = "take the idea and use or publish it without author's permission and reference".
Legality of such action highly depends on the application area and local law.
5)
Unfortunately meaning of "stealing" is rather wide from "borrowing" (without permission) to "committing theft".
I remeber, comments in some open-sources like "the idea stolen from ..."
I'd never imagine it could sound as "undoubtedly severe statement".
Have you ever asked your friend if he stole your pen? (= did you take my pen?)
6)
Finally, I decided to replace it with "grabbed"
I edited the post.

Alexei

BTW, by "GNU-guys" a mentioned agressive adepts of GNU-ideology, see
http://www.gnu.org/l...cense-list.html
http://www.gnu.org/p...hy/free-sw.html
I called them aggressive because they discorage people from using licenses, which don't fit their "philosophy".
GNU foundation stated: "We want to invite business to use the whole GNU system".
No comments

PS
My personal position on freeware is this:
- All software should be free for non-profit and personal use.
- All programmers should be fed, sheltered, and PC+Internet provided for free
But that's just a dream...

[was_jaclaz]

Yep, now that the verb has been "softened" and the target greatly reduced in size, I guess I can properly understand what you meant.

Zealots, fanatics and intregralists are a problem in every category, as much as the few dishonest people that can belong to any movement, party or association.

But I see you agree that using a rhetoric construction like a synecdoche:
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Synecdoche
could be easily misunderstood.

Personally I do like much better the FreeBSD licence:
http://www.freebsd.o...sd-license.html
as compared to the GNU gpl:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
at least for it's simplicity, but I guess that without Richard Stallman and his followers we would now live in a worse world, and I still think that the preamble to the GPL is a work of art.

Now if I may, I am very curious about what you would do:

I personally prefer "free bear"

once you get (without any money exchange taking place) a "bear":
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bear

bear 2 (bâr)
n.
1.
a. Any of various usually omnivorous mammals of the family Ursidae that have a shaggy coat and a short tail and walk with the entire lower surface of the foot touching the ground.
b. Any of various other animals, such as the koala, that resemble a true bear.
2. A large, clumsy, or ill-mannered person.
3.
a. One, such as an investor, that sells securities or commodities in expectation of falling prices.
b. A pessimist, especially regarding business conditions.
4. Slang Something that is difficult or unpleasant: The final exam was a bear.
5. Slang A highway patrol officer.

jaclaz

[Alexei]

Yep, now that the verb has been "softened" and the target greatly reduced in size, I guess I can properly understand what you meant.

Zealots, fanatics and intregralists are a problem in every category, as much as the few dishonest people that can belong to any movement, party or association.

But I see you agree that using a rhetoric construction like a synecdoche:
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Synecdoche
could be easily misunderstood.

Personally I do like much better the FreeBSD licence:
http://www.freebsd.o...sd-license.html
as compared to the GNU gpl:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
at least for it's simplicity, but I guess that without Richard Stallman and his followers we would now live in a worse world, and I still think that the preamble to the GPL is a work of art.

Now if I may, I am very curious about what you would do:

once you get (without any money exchange taking place) a "bear":
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bear








jaclaz

I misspelled it again
Of course, it's beer
Shame on me
Alexei

[pscEx]

I misspelled it again
Of course, it's beer
Shame on me
Alexei

@Alexei:
You wasted half an hour of my time trying to understand your bear.
Peter

[Alexei]

@Alexei:
You wasted half an hour of my time trying to understand your bear.
Peter

Peter
I read somewhere that thinking forces human brain to grow new neurons. You may consider "bear-half-hour" to be just neuron-productive To relieve your - I spent 2 weeks trying to fix networking problem after "forced P2V"
(P2V = "moving OS from physical machine to virtual") - HDD I/O just died on me As a result, I learned some registry tricks, and new neurons began popping out of my ears
You may also want to learn the art of using beer, bear, bare, beard, and bier interchangeably: "grizzly beer", "bear hands", etc.
On serious note: it was just stupid mistake, please accept my apology.

Alexei

[was_jaclaz]

@Alexei:
You wasted half an hour of my time trying to understand your bear.

@Alexei
Maybe peter was just saying that next time you get a "free bear", make sure it speaks at least German or English, so that he can understand it.

If possible, an even more off-topic thing, did you check this?:
http://www.boot-land...?...c=2072&st=8

OT linking to an OT comment, it must be a record!

jaclaz

[windrv]

@Alexei

Most GNU guys are good, intellegent and respectable!

They make contributions and release free stuff under GNU license.

You also have every right to release your work under commercial license.

Anyway we want to live in a free world. Everybody has the freedom to do what they consider the best providing they do no harm to others.

People also have the freedom to look for free stuff for replacing commerical stuff. It is a natural behaviour.

But the economics between looking for free stuff and creating and releasing "free" stuff needs close inspection. Every now and then, we often hear about GNU people talking about how to make a viable commercial model for bread and water. No bread and water stuff cannot be free and be advanced. News even revealed that the Father of Linux once attempted to trade-mark "Linux".

"Looking for free stuff" if turned into a syndrome however makes people take on some undesirable symptoms in one way or another.

In our internet age, if there is such a free stuff that is very useful and advanced in technology, it should be widely known and there is no need for people to "look for it" here and there.

If you have to "look for it" here and there, that means either there is no such free stuff or the free stuff that you spend a lot a lot of time looking for comes up is something that lacks much to be desired.

It is of course nothing wrong to spend your time learning, as a habit or hobby or a learning step, how to make a shabby wooden waggon drawn by horses when people can now ride air jets.

But for the sake of saving a few bucks, as life is short and time is invalueable, it is something wise people would not do. Spending months & years in order to look for free stuff worth a few bucks seems to be some kind of inexplicable syndrome.

We better spend our invalueable time on helping those people, our brothers, sisters, kids and the elderly around us or far away who do not fare so well as we do.

[windrv]

By the way, some Windows 2k3 sp1 files seem to have been embedded into some script(s) downloadable from this site, are there any legal problems?

Please advise or correct me if I am wrong.

[Alexei]

@windrv.
I mostly agree with your 1st post.
Regarding 2nd one, I think you should send personal message to Nuno, mentioning scripts in question.

Alexei
PS
Wether we like it or not, commercialization of the "world of ideas and knowledge" is taking place. Scientists have some strong traditions, which protect their world from total distruction. Unfortunately, the "software world" is much more eroded by "business influence" and we all have to deal with it.
I consider "intellectual property" to be the most terrible invention of 20 century. It promised intellectuals some fare compensation, but instead it gave "business community" the right to rip them off and effectively enslave them. In my opinion, by offering their creations as freeware people raise their voices against intellectual slavory.
I strongly disagree with GNU-philosofy when they consider "free for non-profit use" to be limitation of freedom. I would say to that - "no freedom to tyrants"
GNU-guys are doing honorable job offering free alternatives to commercial software.
My point was that it feels unfair to a (very) small businesses like which I'm going to start.
If GNU kill all small software businesses, independent programmers would be forced to work for big corporations making them stroger. Something's not right here

[pscEx]

I changed the nativeEx_barebone version of BootSDI script:

I removed the encoded MS files, because it is not legal to distribute them.

The script runs with W2003 source w/o limitation. Also the boot screens are now in your native language.
Under XP source a directory must be defined which contains the W2003 files ntdetect.com, ramdisk.sys and setupldr.bin.

I changed WBVerify to detect the defined files (looking into BootSDI) and give an error if they are missing.

That prevents in long project builds an abort after several minutes if the files are missing..

Peter

[felix]

Greetings everyone. First post. Been following this Board for 1 year and i must admit WinBuilder its a great project.Thnx Nuno for making it.

@psc
With the XP in RAM it can be done.You can CAB-Compress the ISO of the PE, not the final one but the one that gets booted in RAM.

Just change the winnt.sif line from rdimage=RamBoot.iso to rdimage=RamBoot.is_.

Its the same method XP uses for its setup files.

The procedure is as follows the RamBoot.is_ gets copied into RAM and then expanded.

After that it gets deleted so it frees memory.

The only drawback is that at boot time you need enough RAM to host the compressed image and the uncompressed one, 500MB at max just like the WinPE limitation.And it needs the Win2003 files:setupldr.bin and ntdetect.com.It won't work with XP ones.

So i wonder because your BootSDI script supports NTFS compression RAM usage can be smaller.

So if you CAB-Compress the image even the CD-Space usage can be smaller.

I tried it with the RamBoot option and it worked.

Do you think it will work with this method?

[pscEx]

@psc
With the XP in RAM it can be done.You can CAB-Compress the ISO of the PE, not the final one but the one that gets booted in RAM.

Hi felix!

I do not understand your intention.
What is 'it' (can be done)?
Can you explain a little bit more?

Peter

[pscEx]

I upload a new version:

Now the setOptions tool is used to fill the scrollboxes for USB and temporary drive letters.

This change makes the probability of an unintended drive disaster (format or overwrite) very low.

(In order to fill the drive lists, you have to click the question mark besides the scroll box.)

Peter

[Nuno Brito]

Greetings everyone. First post. Been following this Board for 1 year

Nice to see you posting for the first time - Actually I do remember when you've registered your username, it was a bit easier to view all newer members at that time, just note we haven't yet reached our first year (there will be a party soon, but keep it to yourself because this is a secret )

Welcome to our community!

@psc
With the XP in RAM it can be done.You can CAB-Compress the ISO of the PE, not the final one but the one that gets booted in RAM.

Just change the winnt.sif line from rdimage=RamBoot.iso to rdimage=RamBoot.is_.

Its the same method XP uses for its setup files.

The procedure is as follows the RamBoot.is_ gets copied into RAM and then expanded.

After that it gets deleted so it frees memory.

The only drawback is that at boot time you need enough RAM to host the compressed image and the uncompressed one, 500MB at max just like the WinPE limitation.And it needs the Win2003 files:setupldr.bin and ntdetect.com.It won't work with XP ones.

So i wonder because your BootSDI script supports NTFS compression RAM usage can be smaller.

So if you CAB-Compress the image even the CD-Space usage can be smaller.

I tried it with the RamBoot option and it worked.

Do you think it will work with this method?

I think you should create a new topic and repost this information so that it doesn't get lost in the sucessive replies. Didn't thought it would be possible to cab compress the RAM bootable ISO this is really good to hear.

It would be fun to apply it on picoXP to see even smaller outputs - maybe up to the range of a 7Mb ISO..

On nativeEx it could also be well applied since the projects are meant to be smaller by nature, or maybe a safety command could be added to prevent compression be used if the expected combined ISO size passes over 500Mb or breach the user defined RAM boot usage (for older 256Mb RAM machines for example)


Peter, good safety addon!!

[TheHive]

Stalking us for a year did we now. lol! Welcome to the board.

[felix]

Hi felix!

I do not understand your intention.
What is 'it' (can be done)?
Can you explain a little bit more?

Peter

I mean you can add an option to the BootSDI script to CAB-Compress the .IMG that gets loaded into RAM that way the size impact on CD would be smaller.Once decompressed everything else would run normally.My original nativeEx build wheights 80MB on CD.With this method i take it down to 36MB and still perfectly working.I'm searching for a way to keep the IMG cab-compressed even when copied to RAM so memory usage could decrease drastically.

@Nuno thnx guys.I'll bring some beer along.
@The Hive don't worry just taking a peek inside.lol

PS: I'll post 2 scripts next days.Nero 6 & Opera 9.Just the time to trim them down a bit.

[nikzzzz]

I upload a new version:

Now the setOptions tool is used to fill the scrollboxes for USB and temporary drive letters.

Peter

Very successful decision.
And what for in this case the choice temporary drive letters is necessary? Any free letter will approach. And the flag "HDD" does not work - all time demountable disks are displayed only.

[pscEx]

And what for in this case the choice temporary drive letters is necessary? Any free letter will approach.

I could remove the 'temporary' drive letter. But the user should make the filal decision:

And the flag "HDD" does not work - all time demountable disks are displayed only.

Explain a little bit more. Should I include HDD's You can try it by replacing the $X$ in [REM-DRIVES] by $XF$.

Peter

[niche99]

Hi,

Clicking the ? button in the Temp location section of the SDIBoot scritpt causes an Access Violation. I am using Winbuilder 068. I have the latest native_ex project.

niche99