[Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea

[Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea

[Ben Taylor]

It dawned on me that I really hate the fact that I can't
really install my HP restore CD's on anything but my
laptop, including a qemu session.  Wouldn't be kind of a
cool thing to provide a bios signature so things like the
HP rescue disks could be used to create a qemu disk image,
while maintaining the validity of the license.

Thoughts?

Re: [Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea

[Hetz Ben Hamo]

Hi,

If I remember correctly, the HP Rescue CD is one heck of a patched XP
+ tons of HP's drivers, utilities and programs which you cannot use
with QEMU, so you'll probably get a really slow XP even if you could
install the rescue CD.

Try to get a generic OEM CD version of XP or retails or an MSDN
version, and use it.

BTW: the HP XP version require the full bios of your HP machine if I
remember correctly.

Thanks,
Hetz

On 4/29/05, Ben Taylor <sol10x86@cox.net> wrote:
> It dawned on me that I really hate the fact that I can't
> really install my HP restore CD's on anything but my
> laptop, including a qemu session.  Wouldn't be kind of a
> cool thing to provide a bios signature so things like the
> HP rescue disks could be used to create a qemu disk image,
> while maintaining the validity of the license.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Qemu-devel mailing list
> Qemu-devel@nongnu.org
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
>

Re: [Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea

[jeebs]

Ben;

Hertz has alreadyc ommented a bit, but I thought I'd add a few thoughts.

> It dawned on me that I really hate the fact that I can't
> really install my HP restore CD's on anything but my

Welcome to Microsoft's grip on the world....

I've never seen an HP restore cd, but if it's anything like a Dell cd, the basic core files are identical to a regular XP cd, except for a couple of text files that point to additional drivers and patches.

I'm a firm believer that a person has a right to the original unmodified files (without unneeded OEM specific junk), so if it was me, I'd make an effort to get the md5's of the regular OEM version of XP (whatever version) and see what is truely different.

I'm definetly not a fan of Microsoft's policies and practices.  I do use Windows, but I don't like the company.

(In fact, you've gotten me curious.... If you want to contact me privately, I wouldn't mind getting the md5 hashes for the files on your HP oem cd.  Just so I can compare them to what other OEM cd's have.  As I said, I've seen a few OEM cd's, but never an HP one.)

> laptop, including a qemu session.  Wouldn't be kind of a
> cool thing to provide a bios signature so things like the

I think the OEM's use a digital signature in the bios.  Encryption stuff.  Microsoft has always been a bit paranoid about the stuff, even going so far as to force oem's to pre-activate and them (MS) disabling the keys used, so they can never actually be activated any way other than by oem preactivation.  (Meaning a mobo or bios change can invalidate your license.)

So you'd have to try and make qemu hardware identical to the HP (or other OEM) so the bios wouldn't notice the difference.  Not an easy task, to put it mildly.

Re: [Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea

[jeebs]

Ben;

>> > the bat files that manipulate this thing, and there is
>> > a bios checker to make sure that the bios of the laptop
>> 
>> I'm pretty sure the 'bios checker' is probably checking for the digital signature in the BIOS.
> 
> It just looks for a string. You wanna see the bat files?
> I booted it under qemu, then copied all the bat files
> off a floppy image.  I have a pair of HP laptops and
> there's not much differnece between the set of bat files.

I think I now understand what you are saying...

The *restore process* just checks for a simple bios string.

That's what HP chose to do.

WinXP itself (to verify the activation) checks more than that.

In that case, once you've done the restore proccess itself, you could use your own backup program and make a copy that isn't protected.

Unfortunately, there aren't too many disk imaging programs I'd recommend.  Both Norton Ghost (the old version) and DriveImage (the old version) have problems.  And I certainly wouldn't recommend the new versions.  None of the opensource stuff I've seen know how to burn to cd/dvd.

*IF* you want it, you can get the dos part of Norton Ghost for free.  It's included in one of their updates from the web site.  You put that onto a basic dos boot floppy and run it that way.  I use Ghost that way, and I know a few others that do.  But none of us really trust Ghost because sometimes it has problems.

You might try a regular copy of DriveImage.

You'd still have to deal with XP activation and the hp specific drivers etc., but you'd have your own image that you could restore to any drive, including to a image.  (I once did that with vmware.  It didn't work too well since the hardware is so different.  You can work around that, but you need an xp cd.)


Anyway, here's the URL for the update to old Norton Ghost.

http://liveupdate.symantec.com/ng2003b793_en.x86

rename it to .zip and extract ghost.exe  (I don't think there is a newer version.)

Put that onto a very basic dos floppy.  (Just dos and an optional mouse driver.)

If you allow it, ghost will 'brand' the drive you are using on track 0.  You can tell it no.


But be warned that trying to copy a working image to another computer (or qemu etc.) isn't likely to work easily.

It can be done, but it's not easy.

It's kind of like doing a mobo swap.

If you can do it before the swap, then you can make certain preperations to get XP to redectect the hardware etc. on the next boot.

If the mobo went out and you've already replaced, then you do need a regular xp cd to install xp over itself to repair things.  Just like doing it with Win98.



>> Microsoft wouldn't tolerate that. They are too greedy.  It'd almost have to be a full cryptographic digital signature.  Something that couldn't be easily forged by the warez crowd.
> 
> Yeah, but who'd really do that. The damn HP rescue disks
> install just one way.  All or nothing. Everything on 

Right.

But once it is installed, you could make a copy and try to take it to another machine.  That's where XP's activation and BIOS check come in at.  That's the part I thought you were talking about.


As for just changing the bios signature to enable the restore process.... that would depend on where the signature is at.  If the space isn't used in the Bochs / qemu bios, you could change it and then rerun the bios checksum program.


Here are a couple of links you might be interested in.

Talks about making an xp from an installed version of xp...  Don't know if it works.  It's just an old link I had.  (Although it might work, I still think it'd be better to get a real oem cd (even dell), and copy the few HP oem files onto it and make a real OEM xp install cd.  That way you never have to worry about all the other junk that HP installs.)
http://www.easydesksoftware.com/recovery.htm#XP

How to swap a mobo without having to reinstall XP.  Similar to moving an image over to qemu or vmware.
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=77909774&m=1400925745&p=1

Re: [Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea

[Thomas Steffen]

On 4/29/05, jeebs@yango.us <jeebs@yango.us> wrote:
> Ben;
> Unfortunately, there aren't too many disk imaging programs I'd recommend.  Both Norton Ghost (the old version) and DriveImage (the old version) have problems.  And I certainly wouldn't recommend the new versions.  None of the opensource stuff I've seen know how to burn to cd/dvd.

I agree here. Norton really seems like technology from the past (DOS,
16bit mode etc).

But I can recommend two programs. The first ist OSS: partimage. It
certainly has its limitations (e.g. it does not know anything about
Windows specials, such as the security ID), but it works from any live
Linux systems, which makes it indefinately more powerful than the
competitors.

The second one is BootItNG from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/. It
is a partition tool, bootloader and image manipulation program. A time
limited test version is available, which should be enough for a one
off partition manipulation. It does not run on top of an OS, but it
still has a number of nice features, including burning to CD (DVD?).

HTH

Thomas

Re: [Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea

[jeebs]

Thomas;

>> Unfortunately, there aren't too many disk imaging programs I'd recommend.
>>  Both Norton Ghost (the old version) and DriveImage (the old version) have problems.

>I agree here. Norton really seems like technology from the past (DOS,
>16bit mode etc).

I disagree about that part.

The underlying OS is pretty much irrelevant because Ghost takes over and does most things itself.

Realistically it wouldn't be any better performance etc. if it ran Linux or embedded XP, etc.  It would be more convenient for the programmers, but that's about all.

Also, I'm not aware of any version of Linux that is small enough to fit onto a 1.44mb floppy (while still having all the needed drivers) and leave more than a meg on the disk for the backup program itself.  (The reality is that bootable floppies are still often far more convenient than a more fragile bootable cd.)

Just because an OS is 16 bit doesn't mean it's automatically bad.

Maybe I'm being a bit over sensitive here, but I've been using computers at home for more than 20 years.  A whole lot can be done with 8 bit systems.  More can be done with 16 bit systems.  32 bits and 64 bits are nice and can make things more convenient, but that doesn't mean that nothing good can be done on 8 or 16 bit systems.

I'm not a fan of DOS or the 8088 etc., but I'm not going to ignore that very useful things can be done with them.  Just because Linux is the latest fashionable OS doesn't mean useful programs can't exist for other OS's.

The faults in Ghost have little or nothing to do with it booting off a DOS floppy.  Things like:

1) Writing to the disk while making a backup (it should only read the disk, not write to it.)

2) Trying to put too much data onto a cd and being unable to close it right.  (Or maybe that's some other writing error.)

3) Failure of self checks while dealing with NTFS file systems.

4) By defualt not putting NTFS files back exactly where they were, but reorganizing the file system.

Those and other problems are programming issues, not OS problems.


>But I can recommend two programs. The first ist OSS: partimage. It
>certainly has its limitations (e.g. it does not know anything about

I've known of partimage for quite a while, but I wouldn't recommend it for two reasons.

First, it's not even vaguely user friendly.  The interface was definetly not written for regular users.  It was written for advanced users and developers.  More specifically, Linux users and developers.

Also, it appears that it can't actually save the compressed disk image to a cd or dvd.

You've got to back up to another drive or partition and then copy them to cd/dvd yourself.

To me, that's a fatal flaw in any program claiming to be a backup program.  Makes it worthless because it's too inconvenient to actually use.  And a backup program you don't use is utterly worthless.

Maybe I'm wrong... but there's nothing what so ever in the docs to even suggest it can burn directly to a cd or dvd.  Between that and the poor user interface, I've never actually used it.  Just booted it up to see what it looked like.  The poor user interface of PartImage is enough to keep me using Ghost or DriveImage, in spite of their problems.


I think this thread has gotten a wee bit off topic for this mailing list...