"xcopy /t /e"

Well, for the most part I think I've successfully made a live bootable Windows 98 CD. Most of the time of course I have to go in to safe mode because one of the drivers is bad. Of course I have to use step-by-step boot since selecting the actual "safe mode" would bypass the autoexec.bat and config.sys, which would leave out the RAM disk driver. Also I can't really use it on a separate computer since it has to find all that new hardware. And lastly I never did get it to use a different version of system.dat such as system.tat so I'm nervous about booting it on a system with an existing Windows installation for fear of a conflict and unpredictable results.

But why did I do all this anyway? Well actually before I get into that I should say I still have the problem of a conflict with one particular file, IOS.VXD. Not sure what that file does or why I need it, but I am fairly certain the system will not boot without it. I think I may or may not have an idea about what is going on. It has something to do with the bootable CD emulating a bootable 3 1/2 inch floppy disk and being a CD-ROM at the same time. The system can't deal with trying to access both devices at once. This new article I found actually has a solution to this, or what is supposed to be a solution to this, involving renaming one particular file. But I seem to still have a problem.

The way I did this is to create a bootable system with everything relevant pointing to the X: drive. My solution to this is to subst a folder to X: and install windows to X:\win, which is what I did before. The other step is to zip up the program files and win directories and unzip them on the fly via the autoexec.bat into a RAM disk specified as x:. Now did you get all that? Good.

I also learned something I didn't know before: apparently trying to boot Windows 98 from a CD isn't that uncommon of a thing because I found a "patched" IO.SYS file that is supposed to solve that problem I mentioned above about the conflicting CD and floppy driver. It's supposed to make the system wait for the CD to finish before loading the next item. But, for me at least, it doesn't seem to actually work. I have no idea why. Maybe it's that file I renamed before?

So if I could just figure out how to make the system find the proper INF and driver files on the fly w/out having to hit Next a bunch of times, or just suppress all that stuff and enable the proper hardware as necessary manually. Of course I have the Windows XP bootable CD thanks to Bart's PE I downloaded and got working.

The real reason I even did all this was to have a platform on which old legacy Win9x and DOS games could be played without the pain of a dual boot or swapping hard drives or whatever. Many of those legacy games can in fact be made to play in Windows XP, but it seems like a lottah trouble and besides I can save disk space that way. Maybe it'd even be a safe way to do a LAN party: disable and/or remove HDDs from system, boot from CD at LAN party and not worry about anyone infecting me with viruses or taking files.

In fact there's a chance I could even write a series of batch files to set such a thing up. As in write a batch file to eliminate all uncessary, non-vital files for the system to operate, leave in necessary video/audio/network/etc drivers and the game or games that need to be played. I don't think that can be done with the Bart's PE program as it severely limits the number of programs that can be run at the same time.

That wouldn't work for all games unfortunately. Even if I burned the bootable distribution with the Win98 system itself only taking up 10 megs to a DVD-R, I would take up so much memory but the end I don't think much of any game would actually work. That and the annoying types saying "just use Knoppix with Wine" or something. Though Wine isn't free. That wouldn't work too well anyway.

So this is for those few games that either don't run at all or don't run well under Windows XP. Any time I wanted to play a particular game I would just take out that particular CD and fire it up, play the game I want and when I'm done simple take out the CD and restart the computer. That's assuming I didn't want to save my game at any given moment. For that I could use a USB thumb drive or something that.

There's still one possibility I never quite understood why it couldn't be attempted: use the handy "HDD emulation" option right a long side "floppy disk emulation". If I could do that I could...well the system would think it was extracting zip files from another HDD to a RAM disk instead of a CD to a RAM disk. Would that really be significantly better than having the system think it booted from a floppy and extracted from a CD?

What I really need to do is figure out how to copy just the files that would need write access to the RAM drive, leaving the rest of the files conveniently stored on the CD, thus maximizing the amount of RAM I would have for system processes. Right now I copy the entire necessary file structure into the RAM drive that is now upwards of 100 Megs. And that's just the OS and no games installed. I wouldn't even be able to run that on a system with 64 Megs of RAM, obviously.

Now if I could some how trick it into thinking there are two partitions...one for program files one for system files? Problem is in both those cases files would need write access, thus prompting all files to be copied to the RAM disk, which is exactly where I am now.

So to make the CD emulate a HDD I would, in the simplest version, format an actual HDD as a bootable disk and copy all the files I currently got going over to that disk as I do now with the RAM disk. Then I would need to find some utility that makes raw images of HDDs including the boot sector then burn it to a CD some how. So in theory it would act as copying files from a HDD to a RAM disk currently does, only from a CD instead of from an actual HDD, thus avoiding the conflict in drivers, right?

The whole point of the HDD drive emulation idea originally was to make the whole system boot from the CD as the HDD, but the CD will of course be read-only so it would cause the page file and presumably registry to freak out with no write access.

I can't believe I wrote an entire two straight pages on my semi-successful bootable Windows 98 CD and I don't even feel like I made that much progress. Actually I forgot some stuff after all that: for I used the free UPX "executable packer" program to further save space in the RAM disk and I used a free utility entitled DOSLFN to enable full long file names in native MS-DOS. This way I could use the command line version of PKZIP to make my win.zip and programs.zip files with full paths in the zip file. If I do it from Windows I get errors about share violations. Without those two minor details I don't think this would have been possible.

Finally I feel the need to explain the title for this entry. You see xcopy /t /e will copy an entire directory structure from one location to another, without the files. That's kind of the way I feel right now. A whole structure created and ready to be filled, but currently without any really contents. In other words my unrealized potential both professionally and personally. It's a like a metaphor or something. A metaphor for my entire life tied up in a special command for a long deprecaited and old operating system. I'm sure that's telling of something, what exactly I have no idea. Sorry that's as deep as either DOS or I go metaphorically speaking.

  ¶ 1:58 AM