Windows 7 - How to change boot animation in Windows 7

ok thats awesome

if you need anything just ask and ill try to help

I am not sure how to disable the integrity check of winload.exe within bootmgr, but there is a trick. Use an older version of bootmgr (for example longhorn version from 2005 works great on Windows 7 (and on a side note I might add that this particular version seemed to pxe boot way faster than the later version too)). If you reboot virtual machines over and over again, it might be a timesaver to not have to update the checksum every time you modify something in winload.exe..

Now I don't really have breaking news, I just tested some of the stuff you (thaimin) already have posted, and want to confirm some of it. I found that the easiest way to remove both the copyright message and startup text is to set font size to 0. Replace the "B" with "0", and you will only have the animation present in the centre of the screen;

Placing the startup text at the very top of page can be done by replacing 20B with 000;
Changing the font size of the startup text is done here;
Changing "12" with "86" will create a huge text that will cover over the copyright message like this;



Joakim

Joakim,

is there any way to increase the birghtness of the Copyright and increasing the text size of both copyright and starting windows?

The Text could basically Cover the entire Image or am i wrong?


BTW:
Does anyone know where those Flashing BMP's for Icons are?
The Yellow one.
I found a few in Aero.msstyles but i am missing some.

@marcusj0015
"birghtness of the Copyright"? It is pure white, that is as bright as things get. Sadly I have not been able to change the color of the startup text.
The text size for both the copyright and the starting windows messages are independently controllable (default to size 11 and 18).

@Ascor
The order of drawing is copyright, start message, animation. This means that the animation will be on top of the startup message.

I have some updates. I have found out the basics of how to decompress the Windows 7 bootmgr (located at C:\Windows\boot\PCAT\bootmgr).

The file contains 3 parts: a boot loader stub that the BIOS loads and 2 PE files. The 1st is just a version resource. The second is a compressed PE file that contains all of the heavy duty booting stuff (including hopefully the magically code to turn off the security for winload).

I have made a little program available from Coder for Life - Projects - Windows 7 Boot Updater - Bootmgr Decompress that can decompress the second PE file. There are minimal instructions on that page.

Please note that the decompression is not 100% accurate, but very close. It is good enough to see all the resources and whatnot. I also have no re-compressor at the moment.

One day we may have to also consider supporting EFI. There is a separate bootmgr and winload for that.

thaimin, you don't know how to change the copyright color?? I just followed you instructions and could change it here;

To get purple text replace 7F7F7FFF with FF00FF00. Can't remember what I did for yellow.

@Ascor
Do you really want text on the entire screen? I think it fails when the text is placed in the area where the animation is. But you could for a test try to place it at the top and increase the size dramatically.

Joakim

@joakim
Oops, I meant startup text color cannot be changed. Yellow would be FFFF00XX (the alpha is apparently ignored)

@Ascor/joakim
As I said, you can put the text where the animation will be but the animation will cover up whatever is behind it. So you'll see something like Start[ANIMATION]dows.

Would you mind elaborating on the details of the compression. I mean how the 2 pe's are interlaced or whatever they are.

Either way, re-compression is not necessary at all.

Joakim

The two PE's are completely independent (at least to the best of my knowledge). The first one has nothing of importance in it.

Re-compression will be necessary. When un-compressed the image is 511.06KB on its own which means that with the stub and other PE file it is well over 512KB total.

The compression method is a variant of LZNT1 (which is a variant of LZSS). If you understand LZSS you will understand the compression used here quite easily. It is a bit different (the sliding window has a sliding size and resets every 4096 uncompressed bytes). The remaining problem is that there are an additional 2 bytes at the start of every 4096 uncompressed bytes (in the very beginning these are 0xCA and 0xBB). I don't know what to do with these two bytes so I just drop them. I thought they were a checksum, but I have tried about 10 different checksums and none of them match. If you can figure out how 0xCA and 0xBB relate to the first 4096 uncompressed bytes that would be awesome!