Okay gents, sorry to keep you waiting so long... I had to finish my half-assed info-sec term paper that I should've been working on last night instead of the EWF thing... Anyways... The EWF does indeed work with WinXP. I'll try to break it down Barney style, but it's not that complicated.
If you hose your system, it's not my fault!!!! I recommend doing this on a secondary drive first to make sure you do it right (or that I didn't forget something).
1) You need 3 files from XPe: ewf.sys, ewfmgr.exe, and ewfntldr. These can be retrieved from the XPe trial available on MSDN. Once you install it just go to the Repositories directory and just look for the most recent versions in the subdirs with all the components.
2) Place ewf.sys in your system32\drivers directory and ewfmgr.exe in system32. Go to your root dir and rename ntldr to ntldr_bak and copy ewfntldr and rename it ntldr.
3) Open up regedit and go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root. Right-Click and choose Permissions. Set "Everyone" to full-control.
4) Open up notepad and copy-and-paste the following lines:
-------copy after this line-----------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\R oot\LEGACY_EWF]
"NextInstance"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\R oot\LEGACY_EWF\0000]
"Service"="EWF"
"Legacy"=dword:00000001
"ConfigFlags"=dword:00000020
"Class"="LegacyDriver"
"ClassGUID"="{8ECC055D-047F-11D1-A537-0000F8753ED1}"
"DeviceDesc"="EWF"
"Capabilities"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\R oot\LEGACY_EWF\0000\Control]
"ActiveService"="EWF"
----------end copy---------------
save the file as ewf1.reg. Double-click and answer yes to both dialogboxes.
5) Go back to regedit and reset the Permissions; Everyone read only.
6) Go to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...sp1_cf_ewf.asp and set the registry entries they detail in that article. Search for "First, verify that the following entries are present on your device". Just add those entries they've got listed there. Notice the "ArcName" value under ewf\Parameters\Protected\Volume0. Be sure to edit it so it matches whichever partition you want to protect.
7) Reboot!! It should boot up normally. Once you reboot go to a command line and run "ewfmgr c:". It should list your settings for that drive (ewfmgr d:, ewfmgr e:, etc., etc.) You can test whether it's working by creating some files (or deleting them) and then rebooting. The volume will not have changed. Now, let's say you want to make some permanent changes on that volume. Run "ewfmgr c: -commitanddisable -live". This will commit any changes and disable ewf right then and there, but you have to remember to run "ewfmgr c: -enable" before you reboot to reenable ewf. That's the prob, you can't enable ewf on the fly, only disable works that way. You can also run "ewfmgr c: -disable" which will disable on reboot without committing. Take a look at the docs for a better idea. There's also an API detailed in the XPe docs for those interested in programmatically configuring EWF (could be useful for touchscreen interface so that a user can disable EWF to run Windows Update or whatever).
That's all I've got for now. Based on what I saw on VirtualPC, writes are indeed being filtered out (the little red light didn't flash at all using VPC, only green for reading). A few things to keep in mind: the more writes you make to your protected volume the more RAM EWF will consume. That's how this thing works! There actually is a setting to send writes to another partition, but I've only worked on RAM types for now. You may want to disable as much as possible: a pagefile doesn't make sense since if you need to use it then you'll run out of memory anyways (remember that all writes go to RAM with EWF). VirusScanners aren't really necessary for a carPC, especially since any virus will get flushed when you reboot. I'm trying to think of what else.... Automatic updates aren't a good idea since it'll just use up RAM by EWF and won't last after a reboot.
I guess that's it for now. If your system gets hosed just try booting up with Last known good configuration. You'll probably need to redo the reg settings. I'll keep testing this. For now, I need to see about how to install a minimal XP SP2 setup on a flash drive.
Have fun!!!
Frito
(btw i think u can shrink xp down more, keep up the good work, btw can u host those files and send them to me? cuz i cant get xpe to install so i cant get those files, to test out ur method)
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