Access Windows XP Embedded through Media Direct 2/3 :)

See this thread:

http://www.dominicself.co.uk/blog/index.php?itemid=992

Quite interesting, and I can confirm it works. I have attached a Powerpoint Presentation I use to gain access to Windows XP Embedded via MD3. It has already been converted to run in the correct format and i've jazzed it up a little as well.

Just don't forget to enable taskmgr.exe following the guide.

Next question, how do we go about adding features to this nifty little installation OR could we now do an UPGRADE to Windows XP SP2 as it recognises CD/DVD and USB drives

More testing to follow shortly.

Chris.

P.S. I know most of you will think what is the aim here when you could simply dual boot / just run Vista, but I can think of 2 advantages immediately.

1 - If you Vista OS ever gets broken, you can access all of the files through this back door OS and recover info.

2 - Nice little hidden area to store other things such as porn etc As far as I can tell is has a fully functional WMP 10 as well. Internet functionality / Networking is disabled however

 

Haha! Atleast you're honest with your own reasoning for 'TripleXP'

 

That's interesting, hopefully someone will figure out how to do something useful with it... Besides porn of course

 

Well you could use it as a 2nd OS, no reason why not. On MD3 you have about 1.5 GB spare on the C:\

Just needs a few features enabling such as Internet etc. That's why I was considering installing the UPGRADE version of Windows XP as my understanding is that this doesn't overwrite certain files, so in theory MD3 would still boot up

 

This would probably be very useful to add a codec pack like K-lite; simply run it from Explorer, and let it install. Now you can watch DivX et al in MD.

I imagine, also, that Microsoft has or will have a PPT/XLS/DOC 2007 viewer, so you can update all your office apps to read that version, too.

 

If you installed the upgrade, you'd then have a normal copy of XP, so what would you gain, the MD interface as the shell?

 

Exactly! And a fully functional XP OS behind it with the ability to view various files that MD3 cannot , you can also quickly boot into XP instead of having to wait ages for Vista to load. On top of this you could extra functionalility for Office 2007 in theory as you have mentioned.

But really the main thing here is it's just for fun, because you can

 

People have already been installing codec packs into MD3... a full XP with networking would be nice at the touch of the MD button... but I have to wonder if having the full XP on there wouldn't mess up some of the quick bootingness of MD.

 

Porn is very usefull for those lonely nights

 

Tonight / Tomorrow night I will be installing XP SP2 "Lite" on this partition and see if it boots ok. I downloaded it via BitTorrent and it's a version that has a lot of features stripped out but it has a lot more functionality than XP Embedded, so performance "should" be ok.

 

Can anyone confirm if you do a normal "upgrade" in Windows XP you loose the boot.ini / autoexec.bat files (i.e. are they overwritten) or does the original files stay the same?

 

You can set vista to show the xp embedded partition as a OS choice on startup but you get the error: ntldr is missing
I did this using a program called VistaBootPro
available here http://www.vistabootpro.org/
And It's FREE

 

After extensive messing around I can confirm the following:

The XP Embedded O/S is so crippled hardly anything works. I managed to get the control panel working only to find most of the icons you see do nothing when you click on them.

Also, you can't install XP over it using a CD as when it begins copying the files it doesn't recognise the logical partition and begins installing it over your Vista O/S

I did manage to get the network running, which means Internet Explorer / Firefox actually work so you can download some basic things, but I wouldn't recommend using it for anything other than files which you may quickly need to access without having to boot up Vista.

But I timed the loading of it only 3 seconds faster than Vista so there really is no point