"Substing the truth"

I'm writing again to get rid of any anxiety about the interview tomorrow morning. I think that worked the last time. I think I it helped considerably. I'm also writing because last night my mind was running on hyper drive and I could not fall asleep for the life of me. So writing out what I'm thinking about will help settle my mind. At least that's my theory.

Firstly for anybody out there who know about this sort thing I now have a "site feed" courtesy of blogger and Atom feeds. You can find the XML formatted file here: http://www.etalii-step.com/atom.xml

For the rest of it I did a good job of wasting today. Last night I read about a project to make Windows XP or 2000 boot from a CD. The project is called Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD and looks as if it was reverse engineered from an existing Microsoft product which is limited to a certain audience. I was going to spend all day getting that to work. But I changed my mind.

Instead I came up with a plan. You see I couldn't stand to see my sister and her fiancé use Windows Me, it's such an awful OS. So I absolutely insisted on installing Windows 2000 on their computer. Her computer is only a Celeron and has only 64 Megs of RAM but it's still better than anything you could get from Me. Unfortunately that means a game her fiancé was playing no longer works at all. Well he hasn't actually complained too much about this but I decided it would be neat to have a bootable Windows9x OS on CD along with the game. The goal being anytime he felt like playing the game he simply put the CD in, restart the computer and Windows 98 boots. Directly from the CD. He could then run the game and play it no problem. When he's done he can take the disk out and restart: back to normal Windows 2000.

For this project I found an article entitled Booting Windows From CD-ROM. Unfortunately, if I may say, this article is not very well written. Basically you have to tell the OS that the OS partition is really a "RAM drive", but only for the files than need to write for some reason. That's mostly the registry. So you have to use the SUBST and RAMDRIVE utilities and also break open a binary file with a text editor to make search for a renamed [extremely vital] system file called system.dat (that's one of the files that makes up the registry, for you trivial persuit types). The file to be edited: io.sys (the main OS file in MS-DOS, for the trivial persuit types).

So basically I have to create the whole Windows 98 installation directory hierarchy along with the stuff the OS wants to write to when it boots and put it on the CD. Then I have to have the start-up files create RAM drives and "SUBST" them to different letters.

Ok (for the trivial pursuit types) a "RAM Drive" is a drive letter the OS sees as a hard drive but is really a portion of the system RAM. The SUBST command allows you to assign a drive letter to a directory. For instance if there's an old legacy DOS app that absolutely must have a file accessed from a particular drive letter you can assign that letter to a folder and put the necessary files in their.

So the OS boots up, creates the RAM drives, SUBSTS the RAM drives, copies the necessary files to the RAM drives and finally boots the OS. I'm still having a bit of trouble however. The problem is in the way CD-ROMs are bootable: by emulating and booting from the emulated floppy disk. So the computer has to boot from the emulated disk, copy files to a RAM disk from the emulated floppy disk and some how boot Windows. So how do you boot Windows knowing it will be dependant on a non-existent floppy drive? And what if the OS sees the actual floppy drive and assigns the emulated one to the B: drive?

I'm going to figure it eventually. Actually I haven't even explained all of it yet. I still have to create an image of the boot sector from both a windows 98 floppy and the installed windows 98 to make it all work.

Of course this is all trivial anyway. Even if I some how got this all to work the whole point of this is to run a game on the CD. And what do I need to do to make it run from a CD? Hack the registry; .ini files and hex edit settings? Actually I could SUBST C: drive to W: and install the game to W:\program files\game while 98 is installed on the HDD, then when I put it on the CD it think it's already there on W: anyway. Ok that might work. Of course even in the whole possibility I somehow got ALL that to work...where do the save games go? Hah! The Windows 2000 I have on the machine is formatted in NTFS, Windows 9x doesn't read or write NTFS. Unless I can set up networking and have it save over the network some how. Or to a floppy maybe. Possibly install CD software and burn it to that. I don't know. Too late to create a separate small partition in FAT32.

See this is the "unhealthy tenacity" I often talk about. Most people would probably give up after 6 hours of trying to get this to work. But not me! I think it's a lot healthier to finish a project like this than to give up with out finishing it. I mean if obsessing over something like this to such a degree isn't unhealthy to begin with. Nah!

I think writing this all out has helped a little bit with the general conceptual understanding of how it's going to work.

I suppose I've rambled on enough for night and besides I have to get up in the morning. Hopefully writing this out will make me capable of sleeping.

I, again, made up the title of last entry. Can't think of any one-liners currently.

  ¶ 12:30 AM