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Inside Vista's Image-Based Install Process
KrispyGlider writes "Vista's installation process is dramatically different from any previous version of Windows: rather than being an 'installer,' the install DVD is actually a preinstalled copy of Windows that simply gets decompressed onto your PC. It is hardware agnostic, so it can adjust to different systems, and you can also install your own apps into it so that your Vista install becomes a full system image install. APCMag.com has published an interview with a Microsoft Australia tech specialist on the inner workings of it as well as a story that looks at some of the pros and cons of image-based installs."
I've had installs of Linux remove my Windows MBR and force grub as the default, its not just windows
Does this make it install faster? How is it different from copying files? Going of on a rant, why are current installers so bloated? InstallShield is like 2 MB in itself, and MSI takes ages to install something. The only good installer I've seen is NSIS (and it's VERY good), it's like 30 KB, copies your files/makes whatever changes you want and that's it.
What do other installers do that make them take hours to finish?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Just to play Devil's Advocate here, but why SHOULD they facilitate the use of other OS'es? Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
1. Home users who buy a machine with Windows pre installed. No worries about dual boot here.
2. Corporate users who load a custom Windows image on new machines. No worries about dual boot here either.
ALSO, if it really is just an image it would be a simple matter to just load it onto a partition then setup dual boot using GRUB. Anyone who feels they NEED dual boot probably already knows how to do it. Most modern Linux distros do a pretty good job of it for newbs too.
Very very very few people NEED dual boot. Some do. Most do not. From Microsoft's point of view, why should they facilitate it when the people who really NEED it (i.e. developers) will have no problem either setting up dual boot or using virtualization?
The final linked article starts with this dubious sounding statement:
... The Vista install DVD is, in fact, just one big system image.
The bottom is about to fall out of the market for imaging tools like Symantec Ghost
But then immediately contradicts itself by pointing out:
But this flexibility only extends to the installation of Windows itself. To clone a full system with apps installed, Symantec Ghost or a similar utility must be used to create that image.
People don't use Ghost to make a copy of an unconfigured fresh install of Windows, they configure it first, then Ghost it. This new installer will have no effect whatsoever on sales of Ghost, or any other imaging software. After such a terrible start to the article, I'm not sure it's even worth reading the rest.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I feel allow duel boot is a good house guest option. People took the effort to purchase your program, and take time to install it. It would be nice if it didn't kill what you already had installed. Microsoft doesn't need to make it a default but an option, I would love it if Install had a checkbox marked Overwrite Boot sector. If it detects more then 1 partition.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ease of installation is not an applicable issue for most of the computing public, who buys computers with the OS already installed.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
So is this revolutionary install concept an exact copy of what we see in Ubuntu?
MS is just anticipating virtual rootkits. Having an image to compare to the installed system will provide a check of subverted files etc.
You should try Vmware. (i believe the player and server version are now free). I have a server that runs fedora 5 and vmware GSX server. Installed in vmware (as guests) is windows 2003, windows XP and windows 2000 all on the same machine.
Each server runs as if it were an independent machine, if one goes down it doesnt take the whole box with it, each machine bridges to the main interface and has full network connectivity, viruses that affect one guest dont affect the others. I have been running this configuration for about 4 years and havent looked back to dual boot madness since..
Bitch you KNOW the side.. WORLD MAFUCKIN WIDE..
Perhaps, although they still have one huge advantage over Vista - they've both been released. Microsoft is settling into the role of Sisyphus, and every time they get close to the release date, their giant stone goes rolling back down the hill for months of additional changes.
Either MS is really taking their time and putting out a stable, low bug system (for a change), or this is just a sign of trouble to come once the install is available on your Dell custom PC...
Major hardware vendors have been doing this with Microsoft OS's for years. HP has their smart start CDs that come with server rigs, and their restore disks that come with workstations that are all based off of the Unattended install principle. Other major vendors (dell, gateway) are no exception. It seems pretty much everybody who deals with thousands of systems knows and uses this capability. The article is just a dog and pony show, touting how wonderful it's going to be now that Microsoft is the gatekeeper of unattended installs. This stuff dates back to win2k, and probably earlier. Ok, so the HAL is no longer an issue for people who liked to goober things with hardware specific images. From the sound of it, the option of a hardware specific image is gone, so the Pro is we lose features?
Oh wait, it looks like the *biggest* change is that unattended.txt (the configuration file for automated installs) is now unattended.xml. Other good ideas used to further extend the Microsoft monopoly on your workstation environment include "binary based image format" (like people have had with ghost for years...)
I've still failed to realise why this would be interesting to someone other than people who work in IT, and even then it fails to be more than a footnote to the vista image deployment gotchas.
Booting another OS from the NT boot loader is significantly more difficult than using a Linux boot loader GUI setup tool.
Why would you expect any different, not just from microsoft but from ANY company out to make money? Why make it easier to use your competitors' products?
Does your Ford come with an instructon book to tell you how to fit a Nissan engine? No it doesn't because there's no good business case for them to do that.
Conversely the kit car you built from parts probably can be adapted to take ford or nissan engines.Why? because the reason you get a kit car is the joy of building it, not which company sold it to you
Comparing Microsoft OS and Linux and saying who's is like asking who would win in fight between Darth Vader and Capt Picard.
Essentially pointless because they live in different universes.
Still, anything that makes installs easier is probably a good thing, at least to the average user.
While I agree in principle, generally speaking the average user will not be installing Windows, or any other OS.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why would you expect any different, not just from microsoft but from ANY company out to make money?
Because the idea that dual-boot somehow causes them to lose money is a false one. They already sold you a copy of Windows, by making it difficult to use that alongside another OS, what are they expecting to acheive? Selling you two copies of Windows to satisfy your dual-boot urge?
Clearly their only motivation is to be anti-competitive, which is what one expects from a convicted monopolist.
I know. I'll just wait for Microsoft to give credit-where-credit-is-due. They'll do that. They're fair. They respect other people's ideas. I'll just wait.
Waiting...
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Still waiting.
Sigh!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm partly responsible for an image that goes on around 5-600 machines at a Midwestern University College lab. We tried RIS when it was out, but althought it was cool, it was simply not practical. The savings of having 'one' image really didn't outweigh the impracticality of it taking 2-3 hours per workstation per lab.
This is no different; currently it doesn't support multicasting and so although it's 'revolutionary' (read: RIS) it still doesn't beat the ability to push down and image to a workstation is less than 20 minutes...oops, did I say a workstation, I meant a lab.
It still won't beat Ghost any time soon, IMO.
'Nerd' is not a synonym for 'Linux user'. This may be a surprise to you; for many others it is not.
Using your Ford / Nissan analogy, I would argue that that applies more to the computer hardware where you can put a different CPU in the computer or a different manufacturer's hard drive because they have largely standardized on the parts that make up a computer. The OS analogy, IMHO, fits better with gasoline. It would be like BP including an additive so that you can't try Exxon gasoline without ruining your vehicle.
Damn it, one of the things that always annoys me about Windows is that it's NOT as simple as copying a bunch of files.
This is mostly due to their inane and out-dated drive lettering scheme.
In Linux (or any Unix), I can move my installed system to a different drive or partition just by copying it. I can install an entire system within a folder of another system. All I have to do is change my drive mounts, add some symlinks, or use chroot, and I can put the entire system anywhere and it's as if nothing changed.
When my Dad bought a new harddrive because his old one was dying, we tried in vain to copy his old system over to the new drive. First we tried imaging it using "dd" on a liveCD, but that didn't work. Then we tried making a new filesystem and using "cp" to just copy the whole thing. That didn't either. We didn't want to spend money on Norton Ghost, just for a one-time thing.. He ended up having to re-install and re-activate XP, re-install all his MS Office software he'd had some trouble with installing in the first place, and finally setting up a whole new system. Just because he wanted to replace his drive!
That, compared to the number of times I've moved my Linux system without a single hitch... I can't believe people put up with this crap. Now instead of keeping things simple, they're moving even FURTHER away from a file-based approach?
I thought Microsoft finnally caught up with a GUI installer for windows. ;)
Why would you expect any different, not just from microsoft but from ANY company out to make money? Why make it easier to use your competitors' products?
... [e]ssentially pointless because they live in different universes.
A compelling reason to do so would be to stress the superiority of one's own product, rather than to rely on ignorance and residual marketshare for profits. Once a market is dominated, torpidity is viable in the shortrun, but not in the long: the hegemony will be destroyed. Take as example AMD's usurpation of Intel's playground. Now, it's too early to say how Apple will handle its dominance in the portable music player market, but if they manage to keep nailing the sweet spot on consumers' demands, they'll hold out against whatever Microsoft and Creative can throw their way.
Comparing Microsoft OS and Linux and saying who's is
I don't know about you, but I live in the same universe as both Microsoft and Linux: the marketplace. Have you ever heard of Apple's Boot Camp? =)
I love reading comments from people who know just enough to post a smug put-down, but not quite enough to explain cogently why something is a silly idea.
I don't believe TAR includes ACL and metadata information related to the filesystem. Or does it?
I guess FUDs ok if it favors Linux. You CAN setup the Windows XP loader to load non-windows OSes.
You're probably thinking of the Fat32 limit. NTFS can handle files in the terabytes. A DVD can only hold around 4.2Gb anyway. If MS is that pressed for space, they'll just give you 2 DVDs - maybe with extra Weezer videos or whatnot. I'd also assume Vista would boot into some sort of installer for the actuall installation. Attempting to install from XP I'd guess would just ask you to reboot (much like OSX installs).
The tar file format, like most unix things has undergone several revisions and branches. In POSIX.1, a new format, called the Pax Interchange Format, was created as a backwards compatible extention of the tar format, that allowed for storing of arbitrary metadata. How this metadata is used is naturally left up to the system's implementation of tar and pax. I don't know how widely these extentions are used. I know that in Mac OS 10.4, metadata including resource forks are supported, but I think they implemented them using thier normal flat-file hacks (._myfile holds metadata for myfile), and not the pax extentions. This man file has a little more information.
There's even more to think about besides ACL's. There are a lot of components in Windows and not all of them come with every version (Home, Media Center, Server, etc.) plus computer vendors want to customize by adding software or changing the default configurations of apps. Many of these components need to be installable as runtime as well as during install, and some components may be incompatable or require complex logic to integrate (for example, installing a component might require adding a new user or group to the system).
What you see during a Vista install is only a small part of the new world of the Vista installer.
I had a look at the beta build 5112. WIM is by no means new. Both the technology and the name of the exe (XIMAGE), first made their debut with Compaq restore disks. The process is different to, say, GHOST, and is more akin to a giant RAR file or something. OS/2 has been doing something along the line with PACK and PACK2 files from way back. The two WIM files represent respectively, a version of WinPE, and the installation. With a slight edit of the WinPE, you can change the shell to cmd.exe, and add your own utilities to it. It then becomes a boot Windows diskette that lives in RAM. After WinPE boots, it runs its default shell, like the eCom station version, is setup. Unlike the OS/2 version [which is about 5 years old], you can't do anything other than install the OS. Oh, well, still 5 years behind the edge. What you can't do with WIM, is to install it from a different version of Windows. Basically, the setup does the rego check etc before it bothers to process the data .WIM.
It does "install" faster, largely because most of the files are in one archive. On the other hand, those of you who had to deal with a faulty file on a cdrom....
W
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.