Anyone ever tried this?

Ok here goes, I have a disc of my standard "tools" that I take with me to customers and use on my own computers for troubleshooting and diagnosing etc. what Im wanting to do is add in bootability to the CD. and be able to boot to windows 9x, 2k and XP using this CD. now nero can make bootable disks and such. and boot disks can e thrown together simply copying boot files from existing installs but, how do I get the boot loaders to play nice with each other? such as being able to choose what OS I want to try and boot to. I'm also looking to add the ability to read NTFS permissions as well as incorporating chntpw (to help with recovery) into this as well. Can I create a little boot.ini or autoexec.bat file referencing folders on the cd containing each set of boot files or how should I do this?

Heh, bout time I made one of these.... keep meaning to after seeing all those stupid "boot any windows system" cds on ebay (which are simply a disc with win98 boot files on it and someones ugly label stuck on the front

it is easily enough to make a bootable CD, but I think it is impossible to boot a running Windows from a CD (using hard disk emulation for example), as Windows requires write access to the medium it's installed on.

it's possible to do this with *nix though.

but seeing you are asking about Windows, that is probably useless info.

the most useful CD I had was something like what you said, a bootable CD with the floppy versions of Partition Magic and Disk Image on it, as well as a lot of other useful utilities.

If there's a computer that won't change in its hardware configuration, then a CD like that with the Disk Image file of that machine's fresh installation is quite useful.

nothing gets written to the floppy on boot. its simply a group of boot files and utilities. thats why install CDs are bootable. and btw, got a link for disk image?

*edit* oh I see what your saying, sorry if I wasnt clear but I simply want to create a bootdisk, just like your average bootdisk except on a CD and for multiple OS's theoretically Id think its possible. just looking for suggestions on implementation

ahhh.... that seems a lot more doable... I'll look into this.

seems like a great idea though.

3 instances of floppy emulation or use the bootable sectors files from the installation cds... I'm not aware of how to do this, but it might be possible.

Another question though... although I can see how you can fit something like 98 and 2000 onto 1 cd, how can you fit 3 onto 1 CD?

Just came up with an idea that might be worth trying out with a CDRW:

start a fresh install of Windows 2000 from within Windows 2000, which puts some files into folders with $ signs, then do the same with XP installation CD. Edit boot.ini so that you are only left with thse 2 installers and not the working Win2000, and use hard disk emulation in Nero....

A good compromise would be to burn the CD using floppy emulation and include the NTFS for DOS driver application from sysinternals.com I use the Pro version at work in a tools CD. It should handle most systems, though dynamic disks are still a problem. *nix can be handled through Knoppix boot CDs from what I hear. That'd get you down to 2 CDs.

I dont intend to use *nix since all my customers and clients are windows based. I have a copy of winternals admin pack that is very powerful (but expensive as hell) so Im looking to make my own type thing. doesnt need as much power but I want it to make my life easier. I have all the different progs like data recovbery, system analysis, tweaking, patches and service packs and whatnot, just want to add bootability to my disc. When I get this finished and working ill definately post how I did it and such.

what do you think of my HD emulation idea (previous post), with the two installers of 2000 and XP? haven't figured out how to add 98 to that though...

hmm an OS on a disc..like knoppix. crazy enough it might work lol. what you would need to do is find what info windows has to change upon bootup (which would prevent it running from a CD) if we can figure out what it needs to write where it would be possible to create an windows OS from a mere disc and maybe a floppy or two. though this is beyond what my intentions are this is definately something to do.. I dont think its too feasible with win 2k and XP would be downright impossible. but using 9x, you might be onto something here. in order to make this work we need to copy an install cd and touch all the files on it to change thier modified date.. then install and make note of versions, dates, sizes and all that... the last thing we need to worry about is the registry. this may require a small usb pen drive to make it work. but either way a 32 (most liklely 64) meg pen drive and cd-rom drive is still less than a hdd. Wow, I now hjave a purpose!! haha. *starts gathering bits and pieces together..

To clarify just because. Im looking for a bootable disc that allows me to get around corrupted boot files and ini's nothing more. though windows on a CD would seriously kick but.

*hindsight* looking back over this... we wont be able to distribute it in any way. might be able to give instructions but distributing a full OS on Cd of M$ os'es is a serious copyright lawsuit waiting to happen. We'll proly have to take the discussion of it off the boards if the mods think its too close to crossing the line. but I still want to work on this..*boots up computer various comps to start working*

started working on this last night, looks like its gonna be difficult, but I may have an idea on how to do this differently. should make the OS run very fast once booted.

You may want to have a look into this.

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

Just some info about Knoppix. If you can't boot a win9x windows computer, you can boot knoppix and access all the windwows files. You can even access NTFS files, but you can only copy them to another medium (floppy, cd-r/rw, FAT32 partition, etc) you cannot write to an NTFS filesystem. This is exteremely handy for recovering data.

There's also been some work on a virus scanner that can be installed into knoppix;s ramdisk while booted from the CD (providing an internet conncetion exists), it will update its virus definiteions and then run. Nice if you don't want to risk boting into a windows bos that has virii.

You can image drives with Knoppix.

You can resize partitions on the fly, but again, I'm not so certain about NTFS support there.

And knoppix can also come optionally equipped with dozens of high-powered network security testing tools.

People are working on password reseters for windows, and other tools that could make it more functional as an all-in-one windows utility CD.

There really are a ton of uses for it, and many custom flavors. It's just learning to use these tools that takes a little time.


Not exactly what you're working on, just information about the capabilities of something similar on the *nix side. It can do a whole lot to windows systems and has saved my posterior a few times.

There already is a Windows password reset(er) made on a Linux boot floppy. Very easy to use, but I think people servicing their own machines (as in they built them, not their own PERSONAL machines) most likely wouldn't need this. In XP, there's no default admin password. If you're security-conscious, then change it from blank to something else. No matter what, you'll know the admin password, so getting into a usable Windows GUI is possible. But, if your users are setting passwords and forgetting them, this might be useful . . .

Z

EDIT . . . changed would to wouldn't (if you're curious . . . I always wondered what people changed when they just put "EDIT" . . . might have been good!)

zachj said:

There already is a Windows password reset(er) made on a Linux boot floppy. Very easy to use, but I think people servicing their own machines (as in they built them, not their own PERSONAL machines) most likely would need this. In XP, there's no default admin password. If you're security-conscious, then change it from blank to something else. No matter what, you'll know the admin password, so getting into a usable Windows GUI is possible. But, if your users are setting passwords and forgetting them, this might be useful . . .

Z

Click to expand...

Unless you have MPD. Or really bad memory. Or use lots and lots of passwords and can't remember wich one you used (I guess that kinda fits in with the previous huh...).

However I can think of some fun stuff to do do friends in the wee hours of the day on our lil LAN parties...

Crystal Method, yep, was reading the various guides there the other nigh
and I have the password recovery thing, its called chntpw and working on incorprating that into this disc as well and Crashoverride: the admin can reset passwords so that user thing isnt needed. What I would use this for is client computers who Im taking over the job of the previous admin who decided to srew the person over when they told the guy to leave.