Boot Screen

Here it is for now, I’ll move it probably next weekend as soon as my server has what it needs.

 

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eh, for the first comment on this I would absolutely NOT recommend you attempt it if you have no past experience with extensive software coding and/or hex editors. Any small error made while doing this could render windows unbootable and you could potentially lose all of everything. Proceed with caution.

 

Option A, probably the safest, would be to use something like from http://www.stardock.com/products/bootskin/

 

Option B, which is potentially quite risky, is the remainder of this post.

 

First thing is you’ll need a good resource extractor/inserter. In theory these would go hand-in-hand with your run-of-the-mill disassembler, but seeing as how those are a fuzzy gray area of illegality those are hard to find and/or sketchy. I found an article (which I’ll mention later) that refers to Resource Hacker (http://www.users.on.net/johnson/resourcehacker/).

 

Next thing I’d recommend you use is something that can work with images and substitute color indices. GIMP doesn’t have an obvious way to do this that I can find, so again following the article I had to use the trial version of Paint Shop Pro (http://www.jasc.com). This isn’t required but will definitely help you to understand the concept of what you’re working with.

 

And thirdly you will need a good hex editor. these have been around quite some time but the good ones are ridiculously hard to find. If you don’t have a good one lying around, I found one called XVI32. The article below recommends another one, I suppose it should work as well.

 

Then of course you need some sort of instructions. I’ll write out what I did, but I got the idea from http://www.geocities.com/thejjoelc/XPbootcolors.html

 

Okay, to start you ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY want to make a different copy of your windows kernel to work on. this way if you screw up you don’t guarantee death and destruction. go to your system32 folder (or system64? on 64-bit systems) and look for the kernel. mine was ntoskrnl.exe. make a new folder on your desktop or in my documents and start off by copying the kernel there. And rename it, immediately. something using the old names, windows will get really annoyed if the file name is more than 8 characters + “.exe”. From here on out we will work only on the copied kernel.

 

Okay, for starters we’re going to get a feel for what we’re dealing with. If you want to, read on ahead past this part, this isn’t crucial but might help you figure out what you’re dealing with. Plus the images you’ll obtain will show you some general guidelines. Open the resource hacker and then from inside that open the kernel. It should have a tree node on the left named “bitmaps” or something like that. open it. There will be many subfolders, hopefully with one image in each of them. some will probably appear all black, that’s expected. You’ll have to go through them 1 by 1 and highlight the .bmp, then go to action >> save [bitmap:#:#]. save them to perhaps the same folder. Then close resource hacker and get it out of the way.

 

Looking at the images as they are, you’ll see some (but not all) of what you remember seeing on boot. you see the all-black files? yup, that’s the rest of them. Windows wanted to make things “more secure” so they “hid” the files. By making them not have colors embedded. Way to go geniuses.

 

So let’s get them with color. Like I said, I couldn’t find this in GIMP and definitely not in paint, so I had to give in and grab the trial of paint shop pro. However if you know how to substitute in a color table or rewrite color tables do so. use that to open the files that look black. Now you need a color index, you can find this at http://www.thetechguide.com/howto/xpbootlogo/16.pal. Now in paint shop pro, with the images open, go to image >> pallete >> load pallette. click the drop box, then the folders icon. add the directory you downloaded the 16.pal file to to the list. Then select it, and select “Maintain indexes”, and click OK. Now it should look pretty familiar. save this file somewhere, you’ll be able to use it for a template later.

 

Once you have them all, then go into your favorite image editing software (or the trial of paint shop pro if you like it) and shoop them. Really you only need to edit the ones that you see, because there are some that I never touched. I only shooped the scrolly bar thing and the main image, and never touched the others. Make them pretty. I’d recommend you upconvert them to RGB color first so that you can work with any images you like and you want have to translate into that horrid color pallette. Make something nice, sexy, geeky, cool, or just plain whatever you like. save the images back into a 16 color index (i’d recommend a RGB version and a 16 color version just for later edits). In the GIMP when converting back to a 16 color index, you go to image >> mode >> indexed. in there select “Generate Optimum Pallette and go to 16 colors. For the color dithering i used none, play around with it until it looks good. there’s always an undo option if you pick the wrong dithering. Obviously this will limit your range of colors, but if you keep it reasonably simple color-wise then you’ll be good. Then just save your file (making sure it’s in the 16 color index). You’ll need to have ALL the images on the same 16 colors, you’ll see why later. If you need help getting them there, i’ll make a note after the next paragraph and it’ll show one way to do it.

 

Now we need to figure out what 16 colors it put into your pallette. Open the picture again, and then (in the GIMP) go to dialogs >> palletts. Right click in the list and import a pallette. Select an image for the source, and pick your image. then double click on teh one you imported. now we get to the tedious part. open notepad, grab a sheet of paper, something. make a list and call it RGB. Go through the 16 colors one by one and double click them and write down their HTML notation. It takes a couple of minutes but is absolutely necessary. Then we get into more stupid windows anti-hack tricks. you’re gonna have to convert from RGB to BGR colors. this is dead easy but time consuming. the colors you just wrote down are in the following format: <2 red hex digits> <2 green hex digits> <2 blue hex digits>. Now you need to rewrite them as <2 blue hex digits> <2 green hex digits> <2 red hex digits>. this isn’t the same as reversing all 6 digits, just the 3 pairs. When you get them all reversed, I recommend you write them out in a single line as well, with “00” separating each 6 digits. this will be useful in a sec.

 

Going back just a sec, if you want help getting all 3 images on the same 16 colors, what I did is took the main image (the one that originally had the windows and the bar outline and the words on it) and took the pallette out of that. you will hopefully have done this. then i just opened up the scrolly bar images (that were previously black) and shooped them with colors picked from the pallette we just extracted. Pick colors that look good and go to town.

 

Okay, now that we have shooped all of our images it’s time to put them back in. You only need to bother with this for ones you have edited. Open Resource Hacker again and open your kernel file. then go to the images that you changed, highlight them (one by one) and go to action >> replace bitmap. open the new bitmap file then hit replace, and you’ll be done with putting your new images in place.

 

Still, thanks to windows “haxor protection” we need to modify the kernel some more or you’re going to get your picture in some really freaky colors. This is where your hex editor comes in handy, as well as the BGR color string we just put together. First go to http://www.geocities.com/thejjoelc/XPbootcolors.html and search for a bold faced string of a bunch of hex digits. It’s in a section called “change the built-in pallette”. highlight all the digits and spaces (everything between the quotes) and hit copy. go into the hex editor and use the replace tool, in the search menu or somewhere similar. Paste the string from the link above into the find section, and where you made that long list of the BGR values with “00”‘s between them, highlight that and copy paste that into the replace section. It should find a section and replace it. save the kernel and close the hex editor.

 

We just hacked that string into the kernel because that is how windows notes to itself what colors are in the files it uses for boot, one of their “haxor protection measures”. Yeah.

 

Anyway, now we need to get the computer to boot to this hacked kernel. Here’s the next really tricky part where you could screw your computer over if you do something wrong. really it’s simple, but so dangerous. take caution.

 

Copy your hacked kernel (with hopefully some name OTHER than ntoskrnl.exe or whatever the original kernel was called) into the system32 (or system64? on 64-bit systems?) folder. then go to the run command (<win key> + r) and type “notepad c:\boot.ini”

 

what we want to do here is COPY (not edit) the line in here that says <something something label=”windows xp” something something>, or something similar. copy it and paste it on the line below. change the label by changing what’s in “”, preferably to some cooler name. at the end of this, tack on ” /kernel=<name of hacked kernel>”. We make this a second entry so that if something did go wrong, there is a very good likelihood that you will still be able to boot normally with the other option. save boot.ini. now’s where things get fun, you gotta try it out, so reboot and see what happens.

 

Basic diagnostics (from experience):

 

1. your computer reboots very shortly after you select your new boot option

>>>>you either messed up the boot.ini line with the wrong kernel name, forgot the space before the /kernel option, otherwise

>>>>messed up the boot.ini line, or you generated a bad kernel. Go back and try again.

 

2. your computer says it has a bad kernel or something similar very shortly after you select your new boot option

>>>>you generated a bad kernel. Go back and try again.

 

3. your computer makes it past the boot menu and some or all of your modifications are nothing more than black screen real estate, but it still makes it to the login screen and runs normally thereafter

>>>>you didn’t convert your images back down to 16 colors. get to it.

 

4. your computer boots and everything looks like you thought it would

>>>>your ego just inflated to 5 times its normal size. get a needle and pop it before it becomes dangerous.

 

5. your computer boots with a completely unmodified style

>>>>you either goofed on the boot.ini modification, selected the wrong boot option, or none of your changes worked. you fail.

 

6. your computer boots and the colors are that of your ceiling during your latest acid trip

>>>>you didn’t change the kernel’s color index properly. make sure you were using BGR colors and that you actually changed it.

 

 

 

References:

http://www.geocities.com/thejjoelc/XPbootcolors.html

http://www.thetechguide.com/howto/xpbootlogo/