Re: re-installing Delphi Application

From: J French (erewhon_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 01/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 10:24:41 +0000 (UTC)

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 09:19:03 GMT, johnd@STRIP.autoartisans.com (John
Dammeyer) wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I know this isn't a 'strict' Delphi question but perhaps someone here
>has the answer or at least can point me to a usenet group that does.
>
>I've developed this Delphi app that will run on an embedded PC104
>system with a touch screen and A/D board. Connection to the outside
>world is via a USB JumpDrive or USB printer. Internally the unit has
>a Compact Flash 512MB card for the hard drive.
>
>Once a unit returns from the field, the managers would like to
>'clean' the system. That means they'd like to run some sort of batch
>file or script that deletes all the temporary files and reconfigures
>the system the way it was before it was shipped out. They also have
>50 units with virgin WIN98SE and the JumpDrive drivers that need
>initial configuring. That means no network support and nothing on the
>desktop that someone could run while the application is starting.
>
>The Deplhi application needs to register a number of ActiveX controls
>and install the DLLs in the proper directory. That's pretty easy
>using Installshield.
>
>But what seems to be the simplest would be to force WIN98SE into
>recovering a backup of the correctly configured system registry. A
>backup that is copied over from the USB JumpDrive. As long as the
>batch application copied over all the correct files to the proper
>directories it wouldn't matter what sort of changes had been made to
>the system, a replacement registry would return the system to it's
>original 'configured' settup.

I am not sure about Jump Drives however I have recently run into a
similar problem on a totally different Win98 device

The Registry is stored in two files both in c:\windows
They are USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT

When the machine is booting you can insert something in AUTOEXEC.BAT
that can copy over those files
- when 98 is fully loaded those files cannot be written to, which is
just as well as they are cached up in RAM

I think you may be able to do everything you want from a batch file
invoked by AUTOEXEC.BAT and only triggered if a 'signal file' is
present

Note that this could create problems if you send out new AX controls

Also I don't think you need to bother with InstallShield
- you can RegSvr32 stuff yourself
  there is even a sneaky way to do it from within code

>
>Alternatively, perhaps creating a system recovery disk image that is
>run from the JumpDrive?

If the JumpDrive is what I think it is, and is run through the USB,
then you need Win98 up and running to access the JumpDrive, but by
then it would be hard to run the recovery stuff

You could have a routine that copies the image to the machine, patches
AUTOEXEC.BAT and then restarts the machine
- when the machine is in DOS mode you can get up to some mischief
  something like Ghost - or even use Int26h yourself
... but to restore an image from the same drive that the image is on
is tricky ...

If you could partition your internal RAM card it would make things
easier.

Also ... IME you need some sort of ROM based bootstrap so you can
configure a totally naked machine - that is how we did something
similar on a precursor to the PC104 design

It would be interesting to know more about your hardware

>
>Has anyone ever done this? Suggestions? Reference books? Different
>Usenet group?

Ghost, Acronis, PowerQuest DriveImage
- there are others about

>
>Thank you.
>
>John Dammeyer
>

Relevant Pages

  • re-installing Delphi Application
    ... I know this isn't a 'strict' Delphi question but perhaps someone here ... has the answer or at least can point me to a usenet group that does. ... initial configuring. ... recovering a backup of the correctly configured system registry. ...
    (comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc)
  • Re: Only One Instance.
    ... Dammeyer) wrote: ... >My application needs to run on program startup. ... >well with an entry into the registry but during development I made a ... >few errors and ended up with two app.exe entries in the registry. ...
    (comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc)