Customizing and OSS: How's it done?

Allright, seems I have a few more questions to find answers for.

First, and most importantly, I would like to apply a custom boot screen to each of my freshly installed XP systems. I have dual cpu's in my laptop, so it isn't as easy as replacing my ntoskrnl.exe file. What I had been doing was appending some code to the end of the line in boot.ini so that it looks like this:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer /bootlogo /noguiboot

Note that the /usepmtimer, /bootlogo, and the /noguiboot are not normally included in the boot.ini. What this does is tell the boot to look for a bitmap in c:\windows, and replace the gui from ntoskrnl.exe with that bitmap.

The problem is, when I apply these settings and reboot, it does not take. I am under the impression that this has something to do with OSS. So what I need to do, is find out where these settings are, so that I can change them. Would I be correct in thinking that this might be found in bootwiz.oss?

My second question, and not nearly so important is, is there a way to customize the look of OSS? Is it possible to replace the wallpaper, and maybe the theme also? I would like to have a wallpaper that matches my system more closely, and also use a theme that is included in my OS. If this is a possibility, where do I look for these files, and are they going to be as simple as replacing a bitmap, or a jpeg, and then replacing a windows style .theme file?

And the last question I have is this: How can I keep OSS from placing those little Bootwiz folders in all of my removable drives? This is really annoying. There is no need for it to place this folder on jumpdrives and external drives. Is there a setting I can adjust to keep this from happening?

 

If adding the parameters to the boot.ini file works when not using OSS, it should work with OSS. The problem here may be that you're not editing the correct boot.ini file. You have two choices to try. You can edit the boot.ini file in the correct "ID" folder in the hidden BOOTWIZ folder or you can edit the boot.ini file from OSS by right-clicking on the properties of the OS, selecting the Files section and editing the boot.ini file.

If you select to edit the boot.ini file directly in the "ID" folder, make sure you only edit files for the OS that is NOT booted.

People have requested options to have custom icons and more control, but Acronis has not released any support for this. As far as I can tell, the icons and graphics are hard-coded into the OSS files.

You can not get rid of the folders. If you delete them, OSS will recreate them. You can, however, hide them if you don't want to see them. If you have viewing of Hidden and System files turned on, though, you'll still see them. OSS keeps the ID of the partition in the BOOTWIZ folder. It helps it to "tag" each partition. I think this has to do with it being able to tell that a partition is still the same partition even after it may have been resized, moved, etc.

 

Thank you for the reply Mudcrab.

Yes, adding the parameters whithout OSS does work. Infact it worked so well that I created an sfx archive to make the job quicker! But alas, I can't figure out how to do this with OSS installed. What you are saying is that OSS makes a copy of boot.ini, and places it in the bootwiz folder? I will check that out. And you say I can edit those outside of the system also? I will look into that too.

I suspected as much with the customization of OSS. I looked through all the folders, and through as many files as I could and found nothing. No problem though.

So, I will need to leave the bootwiz folders on my jump drive and external drive then? That's not cool, but I can live with it.

Thanks for your help again, Mudcrab. I will get to work on the boot.ini files as soon as I am done transferring data.

 

Your advice worked Mudcrab. I went into properties while in OSS, and changed my boot.ini from there. I now have my non-gui bootscreen.

Now it's time to toss it around in photoshop for a nice professional look, and maybe study up more on getting a good krnl file to work with dual cpu's.

 

Actually, these icons and graphics are located in a big zip file appended at the end of the ossmain.exe file. It is then possible to change these, and has been done, eg to include special OSX icons (google it, I don't think more details would be welcomed on this board).

But what kind of internal checking is there in this file? How stable is the changed exe?

Since OSS itself has its own shortcomings as is, these unofficial changes can only be experimental... why add possible problems to an already ailing product?
And of course, such changes would void any warranty that comes with the product, and don't expect support for it.

Acronis would have to provide its own supported patching method... or rewrite the code so that the resource files (icons, wallpaper, etc) are 'liberated' from the executable, rather than decompressed in RAM on each execution.

But I actually wonder if they care that much for this appendage to DD...
Time will tell.