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NT Five

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About NT Five

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    XP Pro x86

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  1. title Install Windows 7 find --set-root --ignore-floppies /IMAGES.TAG map /7.img (hd0) map /Windows/INSTALL/7.iso (0xff) map --hook chainloader (0xff) Just to clarify; 7.img is an empty NTFS formatted image.
  2. I'm not sure I understand. "when booted in the PE"; you mean inside the Windows setup ? I'm not using Windows PE,
  3. Hi Jaclaz, Your links are interesting but I prefer working code because I don't have time to spend hours reading forum threads and experimenting. I don't want to install and use Windows 7 but I have to if I want to keep my job. I strongly dislike all NT 6 OSes and I just want to set it up, set the theme to Windows Classic and forget it ever happened. NT Five
  4. Here is working Grub4DOS code for Windows XP: title Install Windows XP find --set-root --ignore-floppies /IMAGES.TAG map --mem /Windows/INSTALL/D1 (fd1) map --mem (md)0x6000+800 (fd0) map /XP.vhd (hd0) map --mem /Windows/INSTALL/xp.iso (0xff) map --hook dd if=(fd1) of=(fd0) count=1 chainloader (0xff) D1 is a floppy image containing the WinVblock driver. This approach doesn't seem to work for Windows 7
  5. I am trying to install Windows 7 from an .ISO inside an image file using Grub4DOS. Here is the code: title Install Windows 7 find --set-root --ignore-floppies /IMAGES.TAG map /7.img (hd0) map /Windows/INSTALL/7.iso (0xff) map --hook chainloader (0xff) The Windows setup starts up just fine but can't continue. It pops up a dialog box stating it needs a CD/DVD driver. Does anyone here know what kind of driver it's looking for ?
  6. Please don't name the browser after a demon... How about Nova Luna ? (New Moon in Latin)
  7. Currently I am using newmoon xp32-20171006. I made a portable launcher with JauntePE, compressed all the binaries with UPX, installed NoScript, dictionary, and uBlock origin addons. Now I've got a portable browser under 60MB that runs great ! Cheers!
  8. Does anyone know how to patch XP's disk management so it creates NT6 style partitions ? Probably quite easy to patch....
  9. That sounds very interesting! Would you mind explaining how to do this ? Maybe it's a good idea to add this to your Extended XP project together with the 128 GB RAM patch...
  10. WinvBlock has a severe limitation that makes it impossible to create a "tamper proof" system with TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt. It doesn't want to play nice with TrueCrypt's pre-boot authentication in RAM disk mode, and just hangs on boot... ETBoot is a nice idea but my machines don't have CD/DVD drives and I've found a better option to "tamper proof" my system. At the moment my bootable images are stored on a seperate partition that is unmounted when XP reaches the desktop. In theory malware could find a way to break out of the sandbox and also bypass my anti-executable software (very unlikely, but you never know...), and mount the partition behind my back to infect my bootable images... I found a rather elegant solution to prevent this but this method only works with the combo ramdisk.sys and ntldr. Here is the trick (mini tutorial) ; Slim down your XP installation to 470 MB or less. Make a bootable image file of your system with IMG_XP or a similar program. Apply the registry patch for ramdisk.sys and install the TrueCrypt driver. Test the image on your PC and make sure it boots fine using ramdisk.sys. Now you can install an nLited Windows XP in Microsoft Virtual PC on a 2GB virtual hard drive. (Be sure you create a flat vhd image or you will be in trouble later) Install TrueCrypt and encrypt the whole system drive using a strong password. TrueCrypt will demand we create a rescue disk ISO image. Your virtual machine needs a secondary hard drive to store the ISO file TrueCrypt will generate. You will also need it to store a copy of the bootable image file you crafted. When TrueCrypt is finished encrypting you reboot the virtual machine and you enter your password. When you get back to the desktop you copy the bootable image file to the root of the virtual C drive and also add a second entry in its boot.ini that instructs ntldr to boot this image using ramdisk.sys. So now you've got two Windows installations on your encrypted virtual disk. One regular system, bootable in Virtual PC, and another one in the image file, bootable on your real PC in RAM disk mode. Switch off Virtual PC and copy it's virtual disk (the now encrypted VHD container) and the TrueCrypt rescue disk ISO file to the boot partition of your PC. Use Grub4DOS to map the images and to boot from the TC rescue disk. Enter your password and your machine will decrypt the outer container and load the inner image file into RAM. Now here is the magic; Once you get to the desktop you open XP's disk management and you will see that there is no C partition there. The whole drive is missing but it is still accessible in explorer and XP runs just fine. So what the hell has happened here ? During boot the contents of the bootable image file that was sitting in the encrypted VHD container loaded into RAM, but somewhere in this process the mapping of the outer VHD file got lost ! This is not a bug, it's a feature ! It means that once booted, no one can access, touch, delete, corrupt or infect the RAM disk source file without mounting it with TrueCrypt and entering the password... and you can't mount image files directly with TrueCrypt (it can only mount "real" disks), so there is absolutely no way malware or even you can access the source file when the system is running. The only "normal" way to modify the contents of the inner image file is to fire up Virtual PC, attach the VHD file, and boot into Windows in the virtual machine in order to decrypt the VHD container, and if you are really paranoid you can even get rid of this "back door". The only thing you have to do to close that door forever is to delete the first entry in boot.ini, to save the file and to switch off the virtual machine. Now we can only modify the contents of the VHD container if we attach it as a secondary drive in VPC and select the "Decryption without pre-boot authentication" in the TrueCrypt menu, but we still have to enter the password before we can get access. That's pretty good security, huh ? Using this method we can delete the "WINDOWS", the "Documents and Settings" and the "Program Files" folders, and use the space for something else like a second disk image. This trick is only feasible with ntldr and ramdisk.sys and that is why I would like to patch ntldr in order to be able to break the 470 MB limit... Third party drivers are nice but they won't be able to pull this trick off, and don't you folks think it would be sexier if someone patches ntldr so the native Microsoft RAM disk driver will be capable of loading 2 or 3 gig images ?
  11. Running XP (the whole C drive) in RAM makes it much faster. RAM disks are volatile/non-persistent so all changes to the C drive are "forgotten" after reboot, and the system stays "freshly installed" virtually forever. My machine boots a 700 MB image file that contains a heavily customised nlited XP SP3 system in RAM disk mode using the free WinVBlock driver. Some profile folders like the desktop are residing on other partitions, but basicly the whole C drive lives in RAM. When I need to install apps or modify system settings I boot up in File disk (persistent) mode in order to save the changes I make to the system. (changes are written directly to the image file in this mode) Using RAM disk my ultra slow underpowered 2010 netbook feels a lot snappier and malware can not set up camp because a simple reboot flushes all changes made to the C drive. I'm always running as admin, always months behind on security updates and never had problems with malware infections since I use this system (for 8 years now!). No antivirus installed, but using anti-executables and sandboxie for enhanced security. Sandboxie's sandbox folder contents; Pale Moon browser and The Bat email client (all running sandboxed in RAM) No need to use a third party RAM disk driver when using image sizes <470 MB. XP's ramdisk.sys driver works just fine. Only needs a registry entry modification to make the driver start at boot time. There is a check in ntldr that stops bigger images from loading. If someone patches ntldr 2GB+ images will be no problem at all. I think RAM disks and image files are the way to go if one wants enhanced performance, stability and security. Personally I will never go back to a conventional Windows installation...
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