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Re: Re: [Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea
From: |
Ben Taylor |
Subject: |
Re: Re: [Qemu-devel] Windows Laptop Idea |
Date: |
Sun, 1 May 2005 16:38:21 -0400 |
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > The rescue disks aren't an OEM copy of WinXP Home, they
> > are a set of 6 CD's containing a very fixed version of
> > Partition Quest's partition restorer. I went down into
>
> Ahh...
>
> Yeah, you got screwed.
>
> I thought those kinds of practices went out with Win98.
>
> But yeah, I guess some manufacturers aren't honest.
Well, it keeps you from reusing the media on a machine
that it's licensed for, but what I'm trying to do is
setup my XP on my laptop in a QEMU session. I've looked
through the batch files, and it uses a partition quest
binary to do the actual restore, as long as it passes
the bios id check.
> At least be glad you got the cd's. They could have put it on a protected
> hidden partition on your drive. (The IDE drive specs allow for password
> protected hidden drive sections.) So if your hard drive failed, so would
> your copy of XP....
Yeah, I've already had another HP laptop disk crash.
> > the bat files that manipulate this thing, and there is
> > a bios checker to make sure that the bios of the laptop
>
> I'm pretty sure the 'bios checker' is probably checking for the digital
> signature in the BIOS.
Nope. Just the bios id.
> With XP, Microsoft went pretty strong with digital signatures, putting them
> into about every file.
>
> They probably made OEM's do the same with the bios.
>
> That way if you patched it or used some warez bios with some extra feature of
> some sort, the digital signature wouldn't be correct, and the activation
> would fail.
Possibly. But it would be interesting to try to install
it *if* I could set the bios ID on the command line
in qemu.
>
> I have heard of several cases of people upgrading the bios (in some cases to
> an official one, and in others to a hacked one) and the product activation
> failing.
well, again, I'm not terribly thrilled about Microsoft,
but I would like see if it's possible. If M$ did something
else to prevent it from running, then that I can't do
anything about. It is pretty fragile. When I tried to
remove the hibernate partition, XP stopped booting.
>
> So I doubt it's a simple check. Not like looking for "HP OEM" string or some
> such. Something that simple would pretty much defeat the whole point of
> product activation. You'd see warez sites with lots of patched bios's with
> the OEM signature checks in, allowing everybody to run a Dell or other OEM
> version of XP without any activation.
The bios id is part of the directory struture that HP
uses.
> Microsoft wouldn't tolerate that. They are too greedy. It'd almost have to
> be a full cryptographic digital signature. Something that couldn't be easily
> forged by the warez crowd.
I suppose I could remaster the CD's to use QEMU/Bochs's
bios signature, but it'd be easier if I didn't have to
do that.
>
> That's why I said you'd have to emulate the hardware too. So you could use
> the original bios.
yep.
>
> >> I'm a firm believer that a person has a right to the original unmodified
> >> files (without unneeded OEM specific junk), so if it was me, I'd make an
> >> effort to get the md5's of the regular OEM version of XP (whatever
> >> version) and see what is truely different.
> >
> > This would be pretty impossible.
>
> Maybe not....
>
> I remember with Win98 that even many customized rescue cd's, you could often
> manage to extract the correct files and create an install disk.
That may be worth pursuing, just so I can have a
recovery disk in case things really go boom
>
> With XP it would probably be more difficult. More trouble than it'd be
> worth. You could probably uninstall a lot of stuff, and comparing files to a
> regular XP, and so on, and almost get a clean copy. But probably not all the
> way. And it'd be a lot of trouble.
>
> I've never investigated going from an installed copy and trying to make a cd
> from it.
>
> As Hetz said... You might want to look around for a warez copy of xp. Maybe
> borrow a copy from a friend, that way you'd know it'd be legit. (Be careful
> about warez programs... they aren't all trustworthy, if you know what I mean!)
I have a copy of XPHome, but I would like to see if I can
get all the extras that are on the the rescue disks. I
can reinstall them from there, on to the XPHome, but
that's a lot extra work.
Ben