Re: re-installing Delphi Application

From: John Dammeyer (johnd_at_STRIP.autoartisans.com)
Date: 01/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 17:21:12 GMT

erewhon@nowhere.com (J French) wrote:
>The Registry is stored in two files both in c:\windows
>They are USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT

Thanks.
>
>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
>

Perhaps a delsys.bat file called from autoexec.bat. If it's there
then it would delete the two .dat files. In Autoexec.bat, after
calling delsys.bat it would then delete delsys.bat.

>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
>

Do you know if the RegSvr32 modifies the registry? If it does, then
writing an app that does my specific registry entries is trivial.
>>
>>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

That's what I was thinking too after I pondered a bit more. Can't run
the USB as a drive till windows is up so it can't really be a boot
drive.

>
>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 ...

Ghost inadvertantly trashed a couple of the internal flash cards and
so then the boxes needed to be taken apart and the cards pulled and
reformatted. That took them a while since the card wasn't recognized
so it wouldn't format.... catch-22.

>
>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

That's a good point. I'll have my customer contact the hardware
manufacturer.
>
>It would be interesting to know more about your hardware
>
It's a Pentium 566MHz with a 640x480 LCD display in a waterproof
aluminium box held closed with some 32 screws that are locktite glued.
There are three water resistant plugs. One for AC power. Plug it in
and the system starts up. One for the 4-20ma intrinsically safe
internal module and one with a cover that has a USB connector inside.

It's kind of a sophisticated chart recorder. One stripchart (ActiveX)
is from GlobalMajic (along with a button ActiveX control) and the
other I had to write from scratch in order to meet the customer
specifications.

The A/D is a 16 bit custom card that shoves data into an 8K FIFO at
1KHz. That gives me the freedom to pull the data out at the PC end on
their 55ms Timer ticks without worrying about the data integrity.

I'm not allowed to say much about the actual application but I
accumulate up to 2 minutes of data and then save that into a fixed
record size database. (Yes, it gets big and later on I'll rewrite it
to compress the data). The index of the database holds some key
information from the acquired data and that's what is plotted on the
GlobalMajic Stripchart.

John

>>
>>Has anyone ever done this? Suggestions? Reference books? Different
>>Usenet group?
>
>Ghost, Acronis, PowerQuest DriveImage
>- there are others about
>
>>
>>Thank you.
>>
>>John Dammeyer
>>
>