PicoXP

Contents






Overview


The main goal of this project is to achieve the smallest possible boot disk based on the XP Operating System. This goal has been achieved with a project that produces a 13 Mb. XP boot disk with a command line shell.

PicoXP is designed to replace old DOS based boot disks which lack support for SATA harddisks and NTFS partitions. The boot time is extremely reduced since it loads few services and no excessive drivers.
There is no support for GUI applications.

This project was originally developed under the name of nanoXP and is now designated as PicoXP.






Compatibility



No GUI programs are supported, please request help on the forums if you want further information on how to add compatibility for your programs.

This project can be used under Windows 2000 and above. Under Windows Vista you will need to disable the UAC (User Account Control) to allow the creation of needed registry hives.

To build a bootable disc you will need to use a Microsoft Windows XP Install Disc. The type of XP (home, professional) is not relevant but we recommend always using a retail  or corporate version of XP with SP2 included.

As an alternative you can use regular Windows XP, without SP or SP1, or Windows 2003.

If you don't have a satisfatory CD to use as souce then you should download a free trial version of Windows 2003 from the Microsoft site and use this image to build your project  (only the first image is needed to download - around 500Mb). 







Usage



You only need to tell the project where to find the needed files to copy from the source.

We recommend that you copy all your files from the CD to a folder on disk and use this folder as source before following the below usage details.




The project source only needs to be inputed once or changed whenever you wish to use another source. To manually change the source you can always click on the "Paths" tab found on the main window next to the "Script" tab.


Don't forget that most scripts also have configuration options for the user. This is usefull if you wish to change the screen display settings or disable features you don't want.








Bugs



When posting for bugs related to this project please include the following details:


If you run a project and it won't work as you expect, then you should click on the log tab for more information. The log will display where an error has occurred.

It is very important that you upload this log.html when reporting a bug on the forums related to the project. This file contains details which help us understand the conditions under which the project was built. This file is usually sized around 1Mb - 2Mb, but it can be compressed by any popular archiver (7zip, winrar, winzip, etc) to a compressed file sized of about 20Kb.

When posting a message or reporting a bug, please try searching the previous posts for similar reported problems. In most cases if a solution has already been found, it will have been posted. This can save everyone a lot of time when looking for answers.





Please let us know if this page is not complete or if you still haven't found needed information.