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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."
This reminds me of other Microsoft installs I've done over the years, and it smacks of such disdain for the rest of the OS universe. Nowhere in the article, nor can I find evidence anywhere else is there an accomodation for an install where XP is just another OS. I remember my first experience with this, when I installed a Win98 on a linux box, and not only did Win98 not offer a dual boot, it (seemingly) gladly removed my linux MBR and formatted my partition without asking if it was okay, and without saying it had done so. That was quite a surprise.
Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? (Though, knowing XP can point to more than one OS to boot, I'm guessing Microsoft is more gentle if there is a pre-existing Windows OS there.)
I've googled for dual boot information, it looks to be similar to what I already know -- it's easier to set up a dual boot machine on a pre-existing Windows machine.
Hopefully this'll mean Windows may actually be able to deal with changing mainboard & cpu without freaking out and throwing its toys out of the pram.
XP takes a swift nose-dive for me when I upgrade my core components; it makes upgrading an even more painful process. As for Linux, I've yet to test this, but I gather it responds much better than XP to new hardware?
throw new NoSignatureException();
If this is basically going to just decompress windows onto your drive, where do the install options come in to play?
Still, anything that makes installs easier is probably a good thing, at least to the average user.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
I'm sure the idea goes back even further in time but I still find it interesting to see that the technique taken by knoppix, embraced by Kanotix and finally mimiced by Ubuntu is now being used by MS. The question is will you be able to carry around these vista images as a live system taking advantage of it's hardware detection to run your own copy of windows on any machine (real or virtual)? If not officially, will someone be able to produce a neat hack to do it? I would have thought everyone would like to have their own liveDVD of their system, featuring all the stuff they wanted installed and all their settings.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
This is vaguely interesting, I suppose, but I'd much rather see an image-based boot sequence. It should be much faster to copy 100 meg or so of stuff to RAM that to actually wait for all the programs to start up. You'd only need to do the real boot process after installing something, and make a new image before handing control to the user.
IMHO Imaging an OS install is a good thing.
The mother of all windows, Smalltalk, Did just this.
And when you where finished for the day ST did
a sort of core dump to disk. When you want to
start up it restored your workspace just where you left off.
Emacs was so slow to load all of its lisp macros
the authors did the same thing dumping the core
image into an a.out file and starting that each time.
Perhaps You think Imaging a disk is different.
But I propose that its just the same thing as a different
level of the memory hierarchy. You just install into
a 800meg partition and dump to CD. same thing.
Make it bootable, add a start up that rus the installer
and copy it to disk.
8GB and 12GB is absolutely rediculous for a base OS to use. For that matter, it's also rediculous for any end user system without hard disk hogs like modern games, video editing apps, graphics collections, etc installed. I actually long for the days of hard disk and RAM constraints. Developers and dev tools built with this in mind yester-year and could even today even if the constraint was artificial. At 8GB and 12GB, it sounds like Vista is going to throw in not only the kitchen sink but also the whole kitchen and probably part of the living room as well.
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
I always wondered if that was one of the reasons Windows took so freaking long to install. Not only would they be decompressing the CABs, but this would have to happen while the CPU is running 100% to negotiate the disc ---> HD transfer.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I understand the "we can't code for every foreign bootsector" part, but it would be nice if in their installer would have the option of just leaving the boot sector alone.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Actually you raised a good point there....if I may ask a nooby question: Doesn't Windows XP have problems dealing with individual archive files of size 4GB or larger? Therefore, if Windows Vista is a 4GB or more archive, then would you not be able to install Windows Vista?
Regarding the WIM imaging format, has anyone else here attempted to use the operating system deployment feature pack for SMS 2003 to build or deploy a WIM image? WIM is FS Based. Bad sectors on the hard disk, you still need ghost -FRO to make a safe backup. Great. There are other complications with this when imaging PCs as well, such as if the existing filesystem on the PC is reused (as ghost also may do by default, but can be changed on ghost though). If the FS is corrupted on the disk but it gets reused then you end up with systems you just imaged but are hosed. They say WinPE will work in RAM, but I haven't tried it. If it resides on the disk then it is corruptable and is a point of failure during image deployment. Then theres the whole issue of the slowness of the process. OS deployment feature pack process for building an image (when I tried it) was abysmally slow and involved a metric crapload of file copy overhead. Deployment of images is really slow... You could go on an extended lunch and it won't be done yet, while ghost will be done before you can finish a smoke break. The only to pros I can think of for the MS process is 1) You don't have to have whatever it takes someone to set up a deployment system set up around ghost (Great for SMS administrators, MCSEs). 2) You won't have to build custom boot disks with NDIS drivers to load ghost with networking support in DOS mode, which is actually easy to do but can be admittedly difficult for some folks to grasp. I've had to help just about everybody who started using ghost put together working bootdisks. 3) The MS process lets you inject scripts at various points in the process and stuff and makes automation tasks easy without having to do the work of putting together a better automated image build process. But you still need ghost for some stuff. Great gimmick...
The maximum NTFS file size is actually 16TB, as MS has crippled it for some reason or other.