Re: re-installing Delphi Application

From: J French (erewhon_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 01/31/04 

Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 09:32:14 +0000 (UTC)

Inline :-

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 17:21:12 GMT, johnd@STRIP.autoartisans.com (John
Dammeyer) wrote:

>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.

Not delete - COPY c:\windows\user.hld c:\windows\user.dat

Here is something :-

cd\windows
c:\windows\command\attrib -R -H -S SYSTEM.DAT
c:\windows\command\attrib -R -H -S USER.DAT

IF NOT EXIST SYSTEM.HLD copy SYSTEM.DAT SYSTEM.HLD
IF NOT EXIST USER.HLD copy USER.DAT USER.HLD

copy SYSTEM.HLD SYSTEM.DAT
copy USER.HLD USER.DAT

cd\

>
>>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.

It most certainly does modify the Registry
- probably easier and safer to re-register the controls

>>>
>>>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.

EXACTLY ! The old chicken and egg problem

>
>>
>>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.

Nasty - I wonder whether the Flash cards are running under some form
of TrueFlash (TFFS) - that could explain it

Hmm ... I wonder how you managed to run Ghost ?
- maybe a later version that does not insist on DOS mode
- or via some network connection

It would be nice if the cards could be easily removed

>
>>
>>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 is also just possible that there is a DOS driver for the JumpDrive

Also, such machines probably have a boot sequence of some sort
( a bit like booting from Floppy if present )

>>
>>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.

Nice
>
>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.

I follow - sounds interesting

I work on touch screen systems for selling Duty Free onboard aircraft
- we have been through a few machines since I started in 1990
- once we built our own - it cost a fortune and never really worked
that well - power problems mainly

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