PreShell is a BartPE plugin to configure various settings before launching the selected shell.
Main purpose was to circumvent problems on machines with a low amount of RAM
where booting BartPE was not possible or the remaining RAM was insufficient to create a ramdrive with the needed size.
This plugin was written by Joshua, download of plugins@: http://www.drowaelder.de/winpe/PEIndex.htm
This plugin uses:
Paragliders Setpagefile utility: http://www.paraglidernc.com/
Kana Virtual Drive:
http://www.kanasolution.com
Microsoft devcon.exe: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q311272
Bart's nu2shell.exe coming with the latest release of Pebuilder.
Many thanks to sanbarrow for his great ideas concerning virtual disks and,
and Ponzandro for the helpfile.
Setting up the plugin:
Extract the PreShell plugin to your BartPE plugin folder.
Download Paragliders Setpagefile Utility and copy setpagefile.exe to the plugin folder.
PreShell is configured to run as the shell as that is the point of lowest memory consumption.
So take care not to overwrite the following line in the preshell.inf:
0x2, "Setup", "CmdLine", "nu2shell.exe Logon.exe" with another plugin processed later in the building process.
If you decide to run this plugin on machines with a low amount of memory (eg.
64MB),
be sure that the selected ramsize in ramdriv.inf is as low as possible.
Otherwise the reserved RAM selected for your ramdisk could cause your system to
hang at systemstart,
because of insufficient memory ressources.
To password protect your BartPE CD run PasswordCrypter.exe,
type your password and place the crypted password in Logon.ini (PreShellPasswd=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Configure logon.ini to your needs:
If you do not want to run PreShell as the shell and prefere to start it from an autorun.cmd or RunOnceEx key,
comment out Shell1_name=NoShell
Using the Timer option will start the shell configured as Shell1 after the timer has elapsed.
So change all settings in Shell1_xxxx to your needs.
Running the plugin:
PreShell gives you different options to configure settings like timezone, screen resolution,
keyboard layout before launching the selectable shell.
If you are running on a machine with a low amount of physical RAM first thing you should do is to set a pagefile on one of the local drives.
This will be named as configured in logon.ini, e.g. pepagefile.sys.
Remember to delete pepagefile.sys when booting up the normal OS the next time as it will not be deleted when shuting down BartPE!
Selecting a ramdrive gives you a conventional ramdrive allocated to the physical RAM (change your driveletter in logon.ini if you do not use B:)
To reserve the available physical RAM for system processes check the "Use RamFile".
This option will extract a virtual disk to a folder _ramfile_ on the selected drive as writeable space.
Choose the size of the ramfile you need to run your plugins.
All operations done on the ramfile will be transparently redirected to your driveletter set in logon.ini.
Please note that the ramfile starts with a lower size than provided in its filename, but has the ability to grow to the size according to its name.