[HN Gopher] Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
___________________________________________________________________
Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
Author : ksec
Score : 181 points
Date : 2021-09-20 09:36 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| wolpoli wrote:
| After discovering that the Windows 98 DOS bootup disks boots DOS,
| creates a ram drive, and decompresses the various utilities into
| a ram drive, I decided that it would be fun optimizing the bootup
| disk. I tried various things that include switching out the
| cabinet decompressor with pkunzipjr and formating the floppy disk
| with 2MGUI, a utility that puts 2 megabytes of data onto a disk,
| but I couldn't fit the 3 disks set into 1 disk.
|
| Those were fun times.
| pacifika wrote:
| The size of a typically large webpage.
| tossaway9000 wrote:
| I've seen webpack builds larger than this... much larger.
| dang wrote:
| The submitted URL
| (http://web.archive.org/web/20090209050149/http://www.etek.ch...)
| is crashing due to an "internal error", so I've changed it to a
| different URL which isn't - at least for now.
| donatj wrote:
| I misread that "Windows 98 that boots and runs under SMB" and was
| fully expecting a Windows 98 thin client or something of the
| sort.
| m1el wrote:
| I wish this was possible today. But I won't get a small Windows
| 10 distribution no matter how hard I try or how much I'm willing
| to pay.
| exikyut wrote:
| You can, however, get Windows AME, which is kinda interesting.
|
| https://ameliorated.info/
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > To assure that our changes are permanent, we need to remove
| Windows Update and its self-healing ability.
|
| Yikes...
| rkagerer wrote:
| How long has it been around? Anyone here used it extensively
| enough to recommend?
| exikyut wrote:
| An excellent question. It seems interesting, and like it
| has a reasonable social consensus, but I do wonder if
| everyone'll just be going hunting for LTSB 5-10 years from
| now.
|
| ...Maybe treat it like Existential Arch Linux?
|
| (Where "existential" applies to both "the project might be
| dead in a few years" _and_ "they disable Windows Update, so
| not actually Arch Linux" :D)
| m1el wrote:
| Thanks, this seems like a good source of information!
| [deleted]
| earksiinni wrote:
| Hellz yes. I remember buying this and hacking together my own Win
| 98 distros: https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html
|
| Can't believe that their product page is still up. I believe it
| came about after the 90's MS anti-trust cases. MS argued that IE
| was integral to Windows, so these devs made a product to strip IE
| out, just to show that it wasn't as integral as MS claimed. Then
| they built on it and it became a legit product for slimming down
| Windows installs.
| cies wrote:
| > I have only tested this with Windows 98se.
|
| Win98SE the last windows i actually enjoyed using and believed it
| was an improvement over the its predecessor.
|
| Nowadays im afraid to run modern windows without a VM and a
| firewall.
| xav_authentique wrote:
| No love for Windows 2000? NT kernel with the classic Windows
| interface. It ran pretty well on Windows 98 machines and was
| extremely stable.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| I tried once. Kinda liked it but it was heavy on my built-
| for-98-se machine and lacked some things a teenager wanted in
| a computer - like DirectX.
|
| But I've tried anyway. Then I got owned so hard by Nimda that
| it is still the first thing that comes to my mind when I
| think of Windows 2000.
| znpy wrote:
| Win 2000 Professional was my favorite windows ever.
|
| Fast and light as Windows 98 but more stable than Windows XP.
| dleslie wrote:
| So long as you didn't play games. 2000 meant abandoning the
| vast majority of your PC game library, early on.
| com2kid wrote:
| You could hack around that and get DirectX working, I was
| doing all my gaming on Windows 2000 back in the day.
|
| Though I think I may have had a proper dos boot disk for
| some games, hard to remember, it was quite awhile back. :)
| dleslie wrote:
| You would've needed a DOS boot disk, yes; while Win98SE
| was fairly great for playing DOS games, 2000 was most
| certainly not.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Win2K, good memories. Used it for Delphi and some C++ Builder
| development between 2000 and 2001; pretty solid, probably
| more than XP (at least until XPSP2) but needed some more
| horsepower to use it properly.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| >It ran pretty well on Windows 98 machines
|
| I don't think so, for example requirements for RAM:
|
| Windows 98: 16 megabytes (MB) of memory (24 MB recommended)
|
| Windows 2000: 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum;
| u801e wrote:
| I used Win 98 SE for a few years, but I subsequently switched
| to Windows 2000 which was far more stable. I used the same
| installation (installing updates and service packs via Windows
| update) from around 2002 through 2010 until a lightning strike
| took out the system board and the computer could not make it
| past the BIOS POST check.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could
| probably hit the comment limit listing them. Yet it remains my
| favourite operating system of all time, because everything else
| (yes, even precious Debian!) is just _worse_. Worse UI, worse
| memory use, worse hackability...
|
| In Windows 98 SE, there was a button next to "minimise" that
| would give every widget a tooltip explaining what it did and
| how to use it; most programs came with a built-in, GUI
| instruction manual. Nobody else does this! (The best help UI
| ever made, and Microsoft just dropped it...)
|
| Windows 98 SE included its own kernel-based virtual machine
| system, which it used for multi-tasking DOS and "sandboxing"
| DOS drivers. (They had a global lock and full privileges,
| though, so it's not really much of a sandbox.)
|
| Windows 98 came with Active Desktop: you could display bits of
| website on your desktop as widgets (e.g. a weather service). It
| also came with mshta.exe, for HTML Applications; HTAs were
| basically like Electron, but built into the OS, so you didn't
| have loads of insecure Chrome versions clogging up your RAM and
| hard drive. (It _was_ Internet Explorer, but iirc Internet
| Explorer was actually good around about that time.)
|
| Yes, it was DOS-based. Yes, you could log in as the system user
| by clicking "cancel" on the "enter your username and password"
| box. It should be _simple_ to beat that... so why hasn 't
| anyone?
| jordemort wrote:
| This might be the first time I've seen anyone remember Active
| Desktop fondly. I remember it being pretty much universally
| hated during its heyday.
| stavros wrote:
| I, for one, certainly universally hated it.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Would you mind if I break it in parts?
|
| > Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could
| probably hit the comment limit listing them.
|
| Strong evidence it was not that good.
|
| > Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time,
| because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just
| worse. Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability...
|
| In terms of UI, yes, very clean UI by default. You can reach
| that level today but not out of the box. On the other side,
| it came with very few programs installed, so you had to
| install third party apps and consistency went to the trashcan
| once o did that.
|
| Memory management... we have memory control groups today, I
| can install and remove swap files and devices with the system
| running, oomd saves my desktop virtually crashing when under
| memory pressure, I can use compressed memory... I have to
| admit that amount memory usage is way larger today and,
| albeit with third party apps, you could have compressed in
| win9x but it didn't went far.
|
| Now, there's no way win9x comes even close to debian in terms
| of hackability. You can easily install compilation
| dependencies and sources of most packages, modify, compile...
| I don't even want to argue about this.
|
| > In Windows 98 SE, there was a button next to "minimise"
| that would give every widget a tooltip explaining what it did
| and how to use it; most programs came with a built-in, GUI
| instruction manual. Nobody else does this! (The best help UI
| ever made, and Microsoft just dropped it...)
|
| Current tool-tips in clickable items removes the need of such
| feature. Self explainable text boxes also. If you need a '?'
| widget to get help on other widgets, I'd consider the UI is
| not obvious enough and should be fixed.
|
| > Windows 98 SE included its own kernel-based virtual machine
| system, which it used for multi-tasking DOS and "sandboxing"
| DOS drivers. (They had a global lock and full privileges,
| though, so it's not really much of a sandbox.)
|
| Extremely unsafe and unstable! No separation between
| processes' memory and hardware access. UNIX had that since
| the 70's. The 80386 had such features since early 80's. It is
| hard to find a good reason why a popular OS in late 90's had
| no such feature. It was fixed when xp was released by using
| the nt kernel, but it was 3 decades too late.
|
| > Windows 98 came with Active Desktop: you could display bits
| of website on your desktop as widgets (e.g. a weather
| service). It also came with mshta.exe, for HTML Applications;
| HTAs were basically like Electron, but built into the OS, so
| you didn't have loads of insecure Chrome versions clogging up
| your RAM and hard drive. (It was Internet Explorer, but iirc
| Internet Explorer was actually good around about that time.)
|
| By "widgets on the desktop" it meant "ads". Most people
| simply disabled active desktop, it was a major waste of
| resources and minor source of instability. I admit that
| electron apps eat too much memory, but I think it is
| proportional to the amount of RAM available these days. I
| don't think things got worse in this area over time.
|
| Also, IE had its fair share of memory leaks, vulnerabilities
| and instabilities.
|
| > Yes, it was DOS-based. Yes, you could log in as the system
| user by clicking "cancel" on the "enter your username and
| password" box. It should be simple to beat that... so why
| hasn't anyone?
|
| It was beat. Just read above.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Now, there 's no way win9x comes even close to debian in
| terms of hackability._
|
| True... though not for the reasons you've listed. It's
| hackable because half the programs are written in Python or
| Perl, and because it has man pages; your average 6 year old
| mucking about with the system will eventually stumble
| across them. Also, environments like LXDE are fairly
| customisable, providing insight into how the system works.
|
| The ability to download sources with `apt-source` (or
| whatever the command is) isn't useful if the guts aren't
| exposed for you to play with; you'll never want to do
| something if you don't know it's possible in the first
| place. (A bad thing about Windows: I could never make .EXE
| files. A good thing about Windows: I learnt what .EXE and
| .DLL files were, and that they could contain icon
| resources, just by mucking around with the GUI interface.)
|
| But yes, had I grown up with Debian, I probably would've
| had more fun. :-P
| marcodiego wrote:
| I had grown up on win9x and had lots of fun! I had
| contact with other computers/architectures/OSes before,
| during and after it; so I always wanted to get free of
| wintel, but that didn't prevented me from having lots of
| fun.
|
| I tried linux on my first computer. Minilinux was very
| limited, mostly a toy on that machine. Debian didn't had
| support for my keyboard at the time, so I never installed
| it. I tried a RedHat based distro later just to discover
| it had no support for my soundcard and winmodem, so I had
| to go back to windows.
|
| Since the machine was somewhat limited for a late 90's
| early 2000's, I had to take some care when using it. I
| discovered that regedit could be run from DOS and that it
| could backup and recover the register without needing to
| boot windows. I simply stopped uninstalling programs:
| just deleted them and recovered a previous register
| state. With a bit of care I could use the same machine
| from 1998 to 2001 without ever reinstalling windows.
| Friends were impressed because of that.
|
| I could use that machine to run video game emulators,
| abandonware, delphi and c++ builder 5, turboc, IRC, p2p,
| browsing the web, listened to mp3 and watched webstreams
| with realplayer. When the matrix movie arrived I could
| watch it using xvid/divx with some special configurations
| to make it run fast enough on my machine. The software
| was well optimized to do so much with a 200mhz mmx
| processor with 32MB RAM.
|
| Later, the soundcard gained support in 2007 and I
| replaced the modem with a network card, got 2 floppy
| drives units, 2 HDDs a cdrom drive and a cdrw-recorder.
| It became a capable linux box, but it was too late and I
| already had a new machine which had better compatibility
| with linux than with windows. But I still have some fond
| memories of that machine, I repent throwing it away.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Oh, I also disabled Active Desktop. :-) But in retrospect,
| had I been a power-user at the time, I would've used it for
| all sorts of cool stuff.
|
| It's mostly the UI I remember fondly. Technically, of
| course, it was a garbage fire.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > Windows 98 came with Active Desktop: you could display bits
| of website on your desktop as widgets
|
| I never found Active Desktop all that useful. It was annoying
| because if you wanted a jpg desktop wallpaper, it would
| enable Active Desktop just for that. The problem was that it
| noticeably slowed the entire system. I would always convert
| to bmp and use that, taking a hit on disk space (and possibly
| RAM) instead of speed.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I don't see how using a BMP would've taken a hit on RAM; it
| needs to decompress the JPEG to display on the screen
| anyway, after all.
| telendram wrote:
| Well, maybe you have to remember the capacities of these
| days. If my memory serves me right, a "good" computer for
| win98se was 64 MB of RAM. But of course, there were
| plenty of "less powerful" ones still running, with 32 or
| even 16 MB of RAM. With such limitation, I can see how a
| 800x600 BMP image can become a drain on RAM. The swap
| engine tries to make up for it transparently by using
| swap space on spin-disk HDD, but then, it becomes
| sloooow.
| kimixa wrote:
| I think the parent is saying that the jpeg will need to
| be stored uncompressed in ram - likely in exactly the
| same format as the bmp is stored in memory - for the
| graphics system to actually render it out to screen. Not
| that any "extra" cost of a BMP would be trivial.
|
| So, after they're loaded and (possibly) scaled to fit the
| screen, I'd expect every background image to use exactly
| the same memory amount.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > So, after they're loaded and (possibly) scaled to fit
| the screen, I'd expect every background image to use
| exactly the same memory amount.
|
| Well, not centered or tiled backgrounds, which I recall
| Windows did support, and upscaling _could_ be done on a
| per-pixel basis (although I don 't know if that was
| supported), but yes, the image _format_ shouldn 't
| matter.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Windows 98 SE included its own kernel-based virtual machine
| system, which it used for multi-tasking DOS and "sandboxing"
| DOS drivers. (They had a global lock and full privileges,
| though, so it 's not really much of a sandbox.)_
|
| This is one aspect of the Win9x series which is little-
| mentioned and little-understood, but IMHO actually represents
| a huge technical achievement in comparison to NT (which is
| more of a "traditional" OS design) --- it's really a
| hypervisor for DOS VMs with all hardware passed-through by
| default. A similar architecture wouldn't be seen on the PC
| until KVM, over a decade later.
|
| _Yes, you could log in as the system user by clicking
| "cancel" on the "enter your username and password" box._
|
| Win9x being thoroughly a single-user OS, that login dialog
| was designed only for authenticating to the _network_.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| HTAs still work on modern Windows. They can be useful in
| highly restricted corporate environments to provide
| calculator-like apps.
| lmilcin wrote:
| My first PC I ever owned was scrap gathered from my friends.
|
| My only HDD was 120MB Conner Peripherals HDD that fell on asphalt
| out of jacket pocket of my friend while he was riding a bike (no
| kidding!) and was crisscrossed with bad sectors.
|
| I put up an ambitious (back then) plan to map out all broken
| sectors and then try to fit Windows 95 and Delphi2 onto the rest.
|
| I remember I was left with something like 70MB of usable disk
| space and most of it was devoted to Delphi 2.
|
| I have spent a number of days iterating moving some Windows
| files, restarting to see if it still boots and does the job,
| restoring the files if it did not.
|
| I was left with something like 20MB (? I assume, I don't remember
| exactly). There was not a single file that I could remove without
| breaking it, I have edited a lot of registry and INI files to
| disable features to let me remove as much as possible. There was
| no sound support, no plug&play, no unnecessary tools, nothing.
|
| Hats off if you can do the same to Windows98 and shrink it to
| 5MB.
|
| It also reminds me the well known Things That Turbo Pascal Is
| Smaller Than (https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html)
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than
| (https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html)
|
| > The Wikipedia page for C++ (214,251 bytes). $
| wget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal $ wc
| Turbo_Pascal 668 10672 164349 Turbo_Pascal
|
| Never mind C++, rather: The Wikipedia page for Turbo Pascal
| (164,349 bytes).
| exikyut wrote:
| This is honestly awesome.
|
| You would've learned more about the system by
| accident/happenstance than most people learn in years.
|
| You don't have the HDD anymore by any chance, do you? :) it
| would be cool to image it...
|
| So basically you had 70MB total to work with, you squished
| Win95 into 50MB, then had 20MB for Delphi?
|
| What were the rest of the system's specs, and what era was this
| in?
| lmilcin wrote:
| It was circa 1998. It was 386DX, 96MB of memory, had
| monochromatic monitor, no enclosure (it rested on a towel)
| and no mouse (yes, I programmed graphical UIs without a
| mouse). Obviously no networking of any kind.
|
| Yes, it had more memory than HDD!
|
| It was my first development machine (after programmable
| calculator which was stolen) so I have fond memories of it.
|
| I believe minimum Delphi 2 install was over 70MB so I also
| had to cut it up to fit the drive.
| cjdell wrote:
| Love this. Now someone show me how to make a nano Windows 10
| installation without all the telemetry BS. Essentially the kernel
| only with custom explorer.exe.
|
| Experimented with modding Hyper-V Server (the free one) with some
| success, but too many DLLs missing and multimedia functions don't
| work.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I wanted to create a similar "from scratch" installation by
| adding the bootloader and the kernel to a virtual disk image,
| then connecting the kernel-mode debugger from the Driver Kit to
| a virtual machine COM port, and checking what files the kernel
| expects to see before it falls over (as it doesn't find them).
| My end goal would have been to add MSYS2 and launch an init
| system and ultimately a terminal. Unfortunately there were a
| lot of steps before the system gets to a usable state, I don't
| think I was anywhere near that point even after a whole lot of
| reboots & debug sessions.
|
| The summary in this Wikipedia article about the startup process
| helped a lot:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_startup_process
| exikyut wrote:
| Windows AME (https://ameliorated.info/) is a bit extreme, but
| technically does do this
| cjdell wrote:
| I've searched high and low for something like this. Will give
| this a try. Thanks
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Holy shit they remove Windows Update? That sounds like a
| great way to slide into madness as software breaks or malware
| rears its head
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Eh, honestly I usually have Windows Update disabled anyway
| because it causes much more headache than it is worth.
| Occasionally, once a year at most, I re-enable and update
| and it has about a 50/50 chance of not making me wish I'd
| just reinstalled instead.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| That sounds decidedly self-inflicted. Windows 10 (minus
| its LTSC variants) are designed for a much quicker update
| cycle. "jumping" from versions literally a year apart
| sounds like a great way to break things
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is usually better to chose when to risk breaking stuff
| then having some auto updater running.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| From experience, updating constantly is a pretty great
| way to break things anyway. This way at least I am able
| to keep my system stable and working the way I want it to
| for longer, until I'm ready to deal with it potentially
| breaking.
| exikyut wrote:
| Yeah that was kinda the part where I went "....ooookay I
| don't know how _practical_ this is for me, but... uhh...
| _bookmarks anyway_ "
| kunagi7 wrote:
| Maybe you could try by modifying WinPE images [0]. They're
| quite lightweight. WinPE has been around since Windows XP and
| it's updated regularly. The last version matches with Windows
| 11 incoming release.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...
| stragies wrote:
| Projects that build upon WindowsPE have existed since Win2k,
| several of those can be found on github, some updated over
| the years to use newer base images.
|
| But I always wondered about the legality of using that
| approach to create a windows Image you could boot of a USB
| stick, or even a Boot-image server over network.
|
| Afaik, WinPE is the engine under the installation system in
| older version, and can only be legally used in workflows
| peripheral to System installation/debug/repair.
|
| Windows Embedded seems to be the MS-preferred approach these
| days if you need a custom-purpose Windows installation.
|
| How to get/use Windows Embedded legally without an Enterprise
| agreement has be on my "look-into-it-some-day"-list, but
| since I don't have/use Windows-only tools in my daily
| workflows, the urgency has been somewhat steadily decreasing.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| WinPE is super convenient.
|
| I've used to build Linux USB installers for PoS systems. Some
| of these systems used some kind of flashable custom keyboard
| that most of the time had to be programmed in place and the
| proprietary software ran on Windows.
|
| I've build a 100MB-ish image containing the current version
| of WinPE and the program along with its library dependencies.
| I think I had to download some kind of special blob to that
| Syslinux could load it into memory.
|
| I also remember booting a small WinPE ISO into the server
| virtual ISO ILO function to repair remote Windows servers on
| remote retail stores. Pretty much all the disk related stuff
| is included. That particular ISO had the proprietary drivers
| for the server raid controllers.
|
| Anyway very good stuff if you only need to run some old style
| software that doesn't require multitasking.
| [deleted]
| merlinscholz wrote:
| It is still Windows 10, but Windows LTSC would be a start.
|
| Works fine for daily use after you restore some small things.
| janci wrote:
| I actually used this to run Windows in a BOSCH emulator on my
| first smartphone - HTC TyTN II. It was painfully slow and
| unusable for any practical purposes.
| numlock86 wrote:
| What's a BOSCH emulator? Or is this a "bochs" typo?
| stragies wrote:
| He meant "bochs"; I suspect an "autocorrect" miscorrection,
| my tablet does also include popular brand names as "helpful"
| suggestions. And when you don't see any red waves under the
| words before submitting, that miscorrection might go
| unnoticed when posting.
| st_goliath wrote:
| > BOSCH emulator
|
| Do you perhaps mean Bochs[1]? I've seen it booting Windows 95
| on an early PSP and similar stunts, so running Windows inside
| Bochs on a smartphone would IMO not be that much out of the
| ordinary.
|
| Or is there really a PC emulator from BOSCH[2] available
| somewhere?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochs
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_GmbH
| janci wrote:
| Yes, Bochs.
| hyproxia wrote:
| It's obvious that he meant Bochs, no need to play dumb.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Never heard of Bochs before, but I wouldn't be surprised at
| all if Bosch AG had an emulator for some out-of-date PC
| hardware config, given the breadth of components
| (automotive especially) they do. I've found out about much
| crazier things than that on HN.
| st_goliath wrote:
| At least over here (Germany & Austria) Bosch is a very
| common household name, as they not only are one of the
| larger employers around, but also have their logo on lots
| of common household appliances (e.g. dish washers, washing
| machines, ...) and tools, in addition to manufacturing ECUs
| for pretty much the entire German car industry.
|
| I just found the idea quite funny that I could have a
| "BOSCH emulator" in my tool box, right next to my BOSCH
| electric drill. Especially since OP even used the
| capitalized spelling from the brand logo.
|
| I'm not trying to be mean here, I genuinely found it funny
| and tried to point that out the way people usually do in
| social interactions, rather than rudely responding along
| the lines of "OMG you made a typo there". I guess that got
| a little "lost in translation" due to the textual medium
| and culture difference?
| jsudi wrote:
| Siemens writes a lot of software. Wouldn't surprise me if
| Bosch also did
| hda111 wrote:
| Bosch publishes some Java Open Source stuff for IoT.
| st_goliath wrote:
| Yes, indeed. And Siemens actually does have their own
| hypervisor: https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse
| hyper_dynamics wrote:
| They, indeed, do.
| vodkapump wrote:
| Bosch emulator to emulate the advantages of antilock brake
| systems.
| azalemeth wrote:
| In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon
| to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows"
| designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically
| some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or
| similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no
| system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody
| useful to my school's computer administrators who otherwise just
| had to reimage machines all the time with Norton Ghost.
|
| Nowadays it seems that a Windows ISO does not come up short of 4
| GB and this tradition of "repacking" them into small, optimised,
| crap-free operating systems (albeit of questionable legality, but
| inevitably used on a machine that had a real windows license!)
| has been lost. I lament this.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I made one of these for when I was a repair technician at a
| computer shop. They used WinPE, which is the same sort-of-
| Windows environment that installers run.
|
| UBCD4Win was the toolkit I used. It had all my virus scanners,
| data recovery apps, pretty much everything I could ever need on
| there. Like a Linux live CD but with Windows. Shit was
| brilliant!
|
| Windows still does WinPE, but I think that is limited to OEMs
| and other fancy Microsoft-licensed corpos.
| thejosh wrote:
| There are still builds out there, but honestly 4gb isn't much
| when the thumbdrives are so cheap now. Still blows my mind how
| cheap they are!
| zeusk wrote:
| It's still possible to customize .wim images and have post-
| install scripts to declutter stuff but straying from
| standardized edition components can cause future updates to
| lead to a corrupted state, which was the case with windows xp
| as well. It's just not a large enough use case to warrant
| support.
|
| For repair/maintenance, there is WinPE (and now, live USB boot)
| jncraton wrote:
| When I was in high school, I had a specialized CD like this.
| The computers in our labs were configured to prevent us from
| running arbitrary programs, but they weren't configured to
| prevent booting from a CD.
|
| I created a stripped down Windows 95 live CD that had the
| default shell replaced by StarCraft. I could sit down at a
| machine, insert my CD, reboot, and the machine would boot
| directly into SC.
| xattt wrote:
| Tangential, but I installed Longhorn on a high school
| computer without considering the implications. I saw another
| student casually using it a few weeks later like it was
| nothing special. Out of morbid curiosity, I would have loved
| to see the technician who came to fix it.
| nikodunk wrote:
| Wonderful to see Longhorn mentioned. This defined my middle
| school tinkering days, and eventually got me into other
| OSes like Linux.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Hehe, neat! I remember doing something similar, albeit once
| accidentally. Instead of changing the shell (e.g. to
| LiteStep), I forced an old DOS game to be executed before
| windows. Exiting the game would result in shutting down the
| PC.
|
| I was terrified that I removed my OS and replaced it with a
| shareware point and click adventure game.
|
| It was a great learning experience though (esp. for my
| German: https://moorhuhn.fandom.com/de/wiki/Dunkle_Schatten)
| darkblackcorner wrote:
| I remember running Winamp in the background along with
| various games (Diablo, Age of Empires, Red Alert). They
| would always lag terribly.. but not if you didn't log in
| first!
|
| win+R before login was pretty useful - albeit insecure!
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Happy times. With single-digit RAM, every megabyte
| counts!
| vmception wrote:
| These convenient Windows builds on torrent sites can be
| compromised with keyloggers, preconfigured remote desktop
| backdoors and crypto stealing packages now :(
|
| It is interesting how the use of these underground builds are
| prevalent enough to be worthwhile to compromise
| rkagerer wrote:
| On reflection those random downloads altruistically shared
| back in the day by passionate geeks on otherwise sketchy-
| looking sites were never as harmful to me as the user-
| hostile, telemetry-sucking, ad-filled crap clogging up the
| modern appstore.
| Maakuth wrote:
| They created WinPE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Prein
| stallation_Enviro...) for this purpose. The full Windows
| "desktop experience" is not that well suited for this sort of
| stuff anyway.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I wonder why they would repackage a Windows ISO rather than a
| Linux one. My bet is the software that is in these ISO's only
| runs on Windows? Otherwise it would seem that a Linux distro
| would be the perfect candidate for something like this.
| djrogers wrote:
| You have to understand that the state of Linux in the early
| 90s wasn't what it is today. Partitioning/reading/fixing a
| FAT16/FAT32 disk from Linux was perilous, if even
| possible....
| drittich wrote:
| There used to be a hacked version of Windows 3.1 in the early
| '90s that fit on a 3.5" floppy (I think it was called Windows
| Lite), and it was extremely stripped down. The use case was
| that it could launch Write.exe
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write), which let you
| present formatted materials onscreen similar to Word, so it
| acted sort of like a light-weight alternative to PowerPoint.
| Anytime I had to present on someone else's machine, I would use
| it to ensure things would work.
|
| (Write.exe is still present in Windows 10, and redirects to
| WordPad, which replaced Write.exe in Windows 95.)
| scruffyherder wrote:
| those were seemingly easy to make, kernel.exe gdi.exe
| user.exe some drivers and ONE FONT.. lol maybe one program.
| its been a while but it was 'neat'.
| abracadaniel wrote:
| You could also do a slipstream build and make a windows iso
| that had all your programs and drivers pre-installed. It was
| very handy in the days when windows seemed to require
| reinstalling every few months.
| billyjobob wrote:
| There were legal Linux distros that had similiar repair tools
| (e.g. Damn Small Linux) and fit on a 50mb business card sized
| CD-R. Useful to keep in your wallet before the days of USB
| sticks.
| gigel82 wrote:
| I tried WinReducer on Windows 10 recently; it didn't reduce the
| ISO size by much, but it did successfully remove pre-installed
| apps and services that serve no useful purpose (like telemetry,
| legacy server features, etc.). Went with a fine-toothed comb
| through the task scheduler afterwards and managed to get down
| to a pretty snappy Win10 install that quickly boots to the
| desktop with 1.8Gb RAM usage (as opposed to the 2.5Gb RAM I see
| on a regular Win10 install on the same machine).
|
| Don't use its defaults though; it'll remove Microsoft Account
| login and Store (which I wanted because I have Game Pass for
| the kids).
| npteljes wrote:
| I found this same hacker spirit in the FOSS world. Windows just
| struggles so much to be independent from its user, that I
| realized that I have to give up. I hope that many did the same
| and now nurture their talent where at least they don't have to
| swim dead against the current.
| userbinator wrote:
| _I found this same hacker spirit in the FOSS world._
|
| Unfortunately that "hacker spirit" seems to end at "must have
| the source code"; the same can't be said of those customising
| Windows and such, who definitely didn't have the source but
| succeeded nonetheless.
| npteljes wrote:
| How do you mean? Not enough hacker spirit in the FOSS
| world?
| userbinator wrote:
| I meant that they seem lost without source[1], while the
| Windows hackers don't need source.
|
| [1] I remember someone being very surprised that I
| patched the binary of a FOSS application, instead of
| changing the source and compiling it --- the former took
| a few minutes, the latter would've taken far more time
| (to get all the dependencies, build system, etc.) and
| possibly introduced other unwanted changes.
| ntauthority wrote:
| With Windows being componentized, this is often a lot easier
| than it used to be - there's official minimal editions like the
| forgotten Nano Server (or an attempt at remaking it like remin-
| core: https://github.com/replisys/remin-core), IoT, Factory OS
| and whatnot, but even adding the legacy GUI subsystem you can
| get somewhat small when building Windows PE variants like used
| for the default setup/recovery images.
|
| At least a few years ago some of this trend was still alive
| making little PE images that could almost be used for real
| desktop use on sites like reboot.pro and other spin-offs,
| though it seems to be a lot less mainstream than the piracy
| heydays during the XP era.
| easton wrote:
| Factory OS is pretty interesting because it can run any Win32
| app (outside of a hypervisor) via a container, something you
| couldn't do with WinPE as often there were too many libraries
| missing to get something like Chrome running.
|
| I wonder if they'll ever use it to replace WinPE. They've had
| the same installer since Vista, and it probably needs a redo
| (it still takes forever to install Windows).
| nkotov wrote:
| I remember some (pirated) Windows XP versions that were
| minimized as well - with some being under 300 MB.
| jrururufuf666 wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/MicroXP0.82
| smusamashah wrote:
| Hiren's boot CD use to have both live Mini XP and Mini Windows
| 98 for all kind of diagnostics and running the repair tools.
| Back then it was mostly data recovery, bad sector and some
| password breaking tools.
| desktopninja wrote:
| My goto to tool to get WindowsXP down to ~100MB (drivers mostly):
| https://www.nliteos.com/
| Maakuth wrote:
| This could be a nice OS for archive.org's browser embedded PC
| emulator environment: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
| . Not so fun to download 45 megabytes of Windows installation to
| try out some piece of shareware :)
| telendram wrote:
| I think the pb is that it's so barebone that pretty much
| nothing works out of the box. One has to add a few more
| components, depending on which application needs to run (as an
| OS alone is, well, not an end in itself). However, that's where
| it stings : adding "components", yet but which ones ? in which
| order ? how ? Componentization was not a topic, so there's no
| tool, almost no doc, just tribal knowledge on the topic. That
| makes it essentially useless for the vast majority of humanity.
| snvzz wrote:
| Silly it has such complex instructions, instead of a script.
|
| Discourages me from even trying this... can't be that good if the
| person that made it couldn't even make a script.
| noxer wrote:
| 2003 was the per-spoonfeeding era.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| This was a website of someone sharing a little passion project
| with the world. Not someone trying to convince you to do as
| they did because they are convinced that their way of doing
| things was the right way.
| fraktl wrote:
| Instructions are not complex, they're the opposite - they're
| extremely simple.
| nix23 wrote:
| That was in 2003 when people could read and stuff more content
| into their head then one twitter tweet.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The instructions are hardly complicated and frankly I'm not
| sure it would be safe to write this in an 98 era batch file. eg
| removing any files not in a file list is a risky process in
| itself regardless of the constraints of DOS batch files.
| rvba wrote:
| I used to do this to have more space on my old machine.
|
| Sadly I deleted my first drawings made in Windows Paint
| pcardoso wrote:
| I had a friend that did this to run Windows 3.0 (IIRC) on his
| old 286 from a single floppy.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I remember how live distributions became popular among
| technicians in early 2000's. The main advantages they had over
| windows were could more easily pack lots of software, there was
| nothing to care about license and popular hardware usually worked
| out of the box without needing to install specific drivers.
|
| If anyone is impressed by these 5MB, please remember this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025
| LeSaucy wrote:
| Hirens was a brilliant tool for cleaning malware infected
| systems. Most malware of the time would prevent opening task
| manager, regedit, services.msc etc. Often business systems of
| the era had so much manually configured or proprietary software
| that it wasn't always possible to wipe and reinstall.
| fdfsasd22323 wrote:
| This is a pretty cool find! I feel inclined to share my project
| from a while ago, where the idea was (inspired by Dockerfiles) to
| automate the building of a working Windows 98 installation in
| QEMU.
|
| It's fairly janky and slow, but it does what it promises and
| starting from usual installation media will produce a HDD image
| with Windows 98 installed and somewhat customised (containing
| some files I wanted and a custom desktop wallpaper and such).
|
| https://github.com/visual2000/paschke
|
| EDIT: Looking closer, it would be possible to steal tips from
| this guide to make it quicker and faster probably - although the
| aim with Paschke was to start from a vanilla installation media,
| instead of just putting the minimum files needed into a disk
| image.
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(page generated 2021-09-20 23:01 UTC)