#11
Post
by alm » Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:32 pm
I believe I extracted this succesfully about seven months ago. I succesfully integrated the Lenevo PC-Doctor (PC-DR) for desktops. I'm not sure if I tested it beyond the 'this machine is not supported' (my home machines aren't IBM), but since I also run the regular PC-DR with the same bootdisk, I don't expect any problems. To cover all recent Thinkpads required about ten different versions, this would take too much space and was too labor-intensive, so I lost interest in the laptop versions.
I'll try to remember what I did. It's quite a long time ago, so don't expect a step-by-step recipe, but it should be enough to get you going. First I extracted the IMA file from the ISO. This IMA file is a hard disk image with one FAT16 partition. I extracted this partition (basically remove the partition table in front of it), but I don't exactly remember how. I probably mounted it as a virtual HD in VMWare and made a disk image by booting Linux in the VM. Copying this to a spare mass storage device (eg. HD) might also work, but the geometry will mismatch and this may cause problems. DOSEMU also understands HD images if I remember correctly. There are probably also Windows programs that can open HD images.
EDIT: just removing the first 16384 bytes does the job. dd if=filename.IMA of=filename.img bs=512 skip=32 does the job on *NIX (or Windows with Cygwin), WinHex can probably do this to, and so can a million other programs.
After the partition was extracted, I just had a plain FAT16 image, which can be mounted in *nix like any other filesystem image (eg. ISO9660). It now contains three directories and a bunch of DOS files. The three directories are three different versions of PC-DR. plnrchk.bat (which is actually in REXX) determines which of these is right for the current machine. I'm not sure how you would handle this in UBCD. It would probably be possible to convert the REXX to a batch file with some external help or just write a C program to do it. You could also add a PC-DOS bootdisk, which has native REXX support. You can also split them up and add three menu entries, but figuring out the exact revision would suck. The version that I used, for Aptiva/NetVista/..., didn't have this problem, since it contains only one version.
If you read autoexec.bat, you can follow the flow. It asks plnrchk.bat for the correct version, and extracts a bunch of self extracting zip files to the ramdisk. I just extracted them all with unzip to ony directory (per version), copied this directory to /dosapps. I copy all files to the ramdisk in startup.bat, see eg. hutil for an example. I use a customized FreeDOS bootdisk which only loads a CD-ROM driver, HIMEM and a ramdrive, because diagnostic software often doesn't like EMM386. This PC-DR might also work with fdubcd, I haven't tried it.
Alson
