BetaONE will rise again! - Hot Topic: Multi-bootable N-in-1 Cd Howto

Hot Topic: Multi-Bootable N-in-1 CD Howto

(You can view the Full Page of this topic at /http://members.rogers.com/khauyeung/nin1.htm)

To congratulate BetaOne's new opening, I am starting this new thread which is supposed to be of interest to a lot of people.

I shall talk about what is N-in-1, the cdimage and its simple use in making an ISO, cdimage advanced and its optimization magics, making CD Multi-Bootable with Loader and DiskEmulator, editing WinXP/Win2K boot-sector and boot-image files, and finally guilding you to make a "Corporated XP Professional & Home Edition 2in1 CD".

Obviously this is a very large topic which I cannot finish to talk in one single post nor one single day. In the coming couple of days, I will continuosly add new contents into the first post of this thread (the current post) and putting a date mark at the beginning of each new content segment. When you re-visit this thread, always check the first post to view my new stuffs, and then put your comments, questions, discussion contents as a new reply. Please actively join-in discussion and hope that we can generate more creative idea.

I hope this thread is to be handled as a pure discussion thread. I shall let you know if related programs/files are publicly available. But for proprietary programs like cdimage, you have to seek or share it yourselves. Do NOT try to ask me for a link by all means!

[12-18-2001] (Part 1)

About N-in-1:

My N-in-1 experience started 8 months ago when a friend came to me showing his new toy from China - A 3in1 CD which put Windows 2000 Professional, Server and Advanced Server together and integrate them into one single CD. I was very impressed on this amazing CD but did not understand why a single 650 MB normal CD can accomodate 1.5 GB (500 MB x 3) of contents of 3 CD's. Unfortunately, my friend did not understand neither. I was wondering in the next 2 months: What kind of magic compression programs was it made?

CDIMAGE.EXE

I did not get the answer until another friend brought me a piece of proprietary premastering utility CDIMAGE.EXE which was originated from M$ for internal use only. The basic purpose of CDIMAGE is simply to help generating an ISO CD-image for the contents which are previously put under a folder of a hard-drive or a CD-drive. There are options which can control various CD's properties like volume label, time stamp, long filenam, boot sector file and more. All these sounds like the other CD Buring software can do it: CDRWIN, ECDC, Nero. But what makes the N-in-1 possible? It is the -o option, "optimize storage by encoding duplicate files only once".

Optimization Magics

Starting from that moment, I understand the magics: It was not the Compression made the Windows 2000 3in1 CD, but the "optimization" process. It is true that when we extract the contents of the 3 Windows 2000 CD's onto the hard-drive, each of them will occupy about 500 MB adding up a total of around 1.5 GB of hard-drive space. However, when we run the CDIMAGE with the -o option to encode an ISO CD-image, it finds DRIVERS.CAB (a 50 MB file) exists in the i386 folder of all 3 individual versions (Professional, Server and Advanced Server) and these 3 files are duplicate files, so it store the 3 DRIVERS.CAB's only once in the final encoding CD-image and updating the file allocation table of the CD so that the 3 DRIVER.CAB's distributed in 3 individual directories will point to the same physical address on the CD. Now we save 100 MB of space by doing optimization on duplicate files of DRIVERS.CAB only, we should not be surprised that we can get 1.5 GB being squeezed into less than 650 MB after the whole optimization process is finished on the other duplicate files.

Obviously, the optimization magics of CDIMAGE is particularly useful in making somthing like Windows 2000 3in1 and Windows XP 6in1 where more than 95% of the contents in different OS's are of duplicate files. Beyonds the N-in-1, the -o option is also a good tool to bind more different applications, or different versions of application from the same software vendor onto a single CD. Example 1: Symantec System Works 2002 contains a basic version of Winfax Pro, but a Deluxe version of Winfax Pro and Talkwork Pro are also available and will be more powerful, they can be re-pack to one CD with CDIMAGE -o option without taking much of additional space. Example 2: The Adobe Acrobat 5.0 does accompany with different Adobe's applications on the Adobe Utimate Collection CD, we can use -o option to optimize the CD once again so that more space can now be spared for more Goodies. With your imagination, you can think about more situation where optimization magics can be applied. If you have any good idea, please post it to share.

More contents are coming. Stay tuned and start your postings....

Because of the Length Limit of a message, I have to put the next new content segment in a new reply. Please read my new reply on 12-19-2001 under the current thread!

Last edited by khauyeung at Jul 20 2002, 10:03 AM