Using minLogon to speed up booting and decrease footprint

**momanz** · 12-23-2004, 07:14 PM

So I've been sitting an airport for 5 hours and I decided to do a little more digging on possibly making things even faster (take a look at the bootvis trace results in a previous post).

The SMSS.EXE process is the session manager. Not sure if there is anything we can do with this one... perhaps the XPE analogue can be used here?

CSRSS.EXE is the Client/Server Runtime Server Subsystem... this one look like it controls part of the graphical interface for windows, it also creates and deletes threads so I think we need it...

LSASS.EXE <from a microsft website>

The local security authentication (LSA) subsystem server component generates the process that authenticates users for the Winlogon service. The LSA also responds to authentication information received from the Graphical Identification and Authentication (GINA) Msgina.dll component. If authentication is successful, Lsass.exe generates the user's access token, which starts the initial shell. Other processes that the user initiates inherit this token.

Somewhere on the MSDN XPE website it states that minlogon does not use LSA, the question is do any other applications need or use it? If not let's get rid of it! I won't be able to attempt this until I return home (another week). Perhaps someone else would like to give it a try.

Good luck...

**bigman1** · 12-24-2004, 02:26 AM

When I imported the regfile, I left out this line "LsaStart"="%SystemRoot%\\system32\\lsass.exe" , and all seemed to work fine without it. I did this in vmware, and I installed and played with a lot of different applications to find out if it caused any problems. So far so good.
Wayne

**Skraggy_uk** · 12-24-2004, 03:17 AM

OK, including the .reg file for EWF in commandlines.txt didn't appear to work, but I'm going to play with that in another install check later, but manually running the reg file did, so I'm going to see what went wrong with auto running it.

Have it installed using my C drive now, lets see if I can configure the bloody thing now.
A VMWare install on a duron 1.3 with 256 meg ram and VMWare tools loads to desktop in 30 seconds.

**Skraggy_uk** · 12-24-2004, 05:23 AM

OK, problem fixed. It was down to VMWare tools being installed while the ewf was enabled.

After disabling installing VMWaretools and re-enabling, all good.

Time to fine tune the install of destinator, centrafuse and it reqs.

**mattdisaster** · 12-24-2004, 10:00 AM

Hi everyone, I'm running winxp pro sp2 installed. A few problems arose when i tried doing this, first I couldnt find the ntldr file, and then right afterwards i couldnt set the file permissions for everyone in regedit. And when i try and run the .reg file I made it wont let me. Any ideas? Thanks so much in advance!

-matt

**FetLyd** · 12-25-2004, 08:48 AM

I think EWF has to be installed AFTER windows is installed, otherwise I guess it wouldn't ever finish.. Unless we found a way to disable it during installation, then enable it after..

**knubile** · 12-25-2004, 02:21 PM

I think the enable disable settings is in the registry. Not sure which setting, but I think you could adjust it and have it disabled right away.

**FetLyd** · 12-25-2004, 03:10 PM

i'll try it out later tonight..

**gospeed.racer** · 12-26-2004, 11:58 PM

Ok, I am still having issues getting this to take. Here are the steps I took so far...

Downloaded the required files and unzipped. Put the $oem$ folder in the same folder that I386 resides in, as with all my unattended cd's that I have made. Left the folders inside alone as they looked to be configured correctly. Added the 2 minlogon files to the System32 folder that was created in the prior unzip. Burned to a cd without running Nlite yet. Here is what I get:
Computer starts up normally but seems no different, log in screens are unchaged. I read that sometimes the winlogin.exe needs to be deleted and the minlogon.exe needs to be renamed to become the new winlogon.exe. I dont have a winlogon to start with, so I rename the minlogon.exe to winlogon.exe and reboot. Still no change. I figure that the reg tweaks may have not been installed so I ran both .reg files and the fetlyd.exe and from there i now get a login screen asking for a password. Any thoughts?

**FetLyd** · 12-27-2004, 12:27 PM

Originally Posted by mattdisaster

Hi everyone, I'm running winxp pro sp2 installed. A few problems arose when i tried doing this, first I couldnt find the ntldr file, and then right afterwards i couldnt set the file permissions for everyone in regedit. And when i try and run the .reg file I made it wont let me. Any ideas? Thanks so much in advance!

-matt

I believe NTLDR is hidden, so you'll have to active the option to show hidden files.. Also, I think it needs to be set as readonly + hidden..

What happens when you try to allow everyone to access registry?