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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
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.
My geek karma must be off today. When I read the title, instead of thinking CD image, I thought "what, is windows going to just be a bunch of pictures of guys pointing and clicking with no actual instructions like an IKEA assembly manual"?
Anywho, this is a cool idea and it's begging for someone to create a "Vista Live" hack, much like the current *nix live CD's (Knoppix anyone?).
Yeah, it's Monday.
However, all this is about to change. Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft's Windows Imaging Format (or WIM), a file-based imaging standard rather than a sector-based. this means that the image isn't a bit-for-bit image of your disk layout, and hence you can apply the image to a new system without destroying the contents of the hard drive.
Wow how revolutionary.
Oh, hang on a second while I untar this archive....
Vista's released, won't DVDs be obsolete anyway?
Maybe they can put both Vista and Duke Nuke Em 3D on the same HD-DVD/BluRay disc when they're released in a few years.
Some say Vista's image is tarnished, but I think we should wait until the next Apple commercial to see if it really works or not.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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?
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.
I'd love to spend a week -emerge(ing) a Vista designed specifically for my computer.
MS is just anticipating virtual rootkits. Having an image to compare to the installed system will provide a check of subverted files etc.
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...
If this is basically going to just decompress windows onto your drive, where do the install options come in to play?
<sarcasm>
Perhaps they will be automatically detected/deduced for you by the same infallable logic engine we have come to know and love from the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' pirate software detector thus rendering manual configuration unnecessary in which case the manual configuration utility may well have been removed from Windows Vista.
</sarcasm>
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
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.
OK...does that mean that Vista will be unsure as to whether my hardware exists or not? Hmm... "VISTA HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION... actually is it illegal? who says what is legal or not? Perhaps it is legal for me but not for you? sorry, WINDOWS DOES NOT BELIEVE YOUR HARDWARE EXISTS. CONVINCE ME YOUR HARDWARE IS THERE, AND ILL LET YOU INTO YOUR COMPUTER" I think I would prefer "hardware fanaticism" personally. -JWR
-JWR
He mentioned corrupt boot sectors (no boot sectors or boot sector virus), but primarily emphasized the user freindliness for those users who try to install/upgrade. He also mentioned that it wasn't possible for MS to code for every single "foreign" boot sector out there.
Prove it.
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.
does vista break ghost then?
Doubtful, seeing how vista isn't even out yet, and Ghost has been broken for many years.
(couldn't resist)
sic transit gloria mundi
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. ;)
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 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.
Depending on how you set up your system, the maximum file size in NTFS is either 18EB or 32*16EB.
NTFS is, was, and always has been a 64-bit file system -- 11 years and counting.
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.
The maximum NTFS file size is actually 16TB, as MS has crippled it for some reason or other.