Reverse Engineering Sony Repair CD's

I am wondering if anyone has ever put any effort into removing all the crapware from the repair DVD's, to attempt to make their own fresh start?

I have started investigating the DVD's, but it would be quicker if someone had already attempted this and has information.

 

I have started to. I have been through about a dozen installs now. I have been able to assemble the sony.pak files to make the sony.wim. I have been able to look at the .wim file in the Windows 7 AIK. I have also been able to lay down the sony.wim using imagex. Word of caution here. If you are attempting to JUST lay down the sony.wim you need to inject your language files into the wim beforehand. If you don't you will be getting a BSOD at boot complaining about "licensed language files".

I have started trying to trace my way through the unattended.xml and the file itself is simple, however it calls a bunch of custom sony processes that are tough to pin down.

If I had copies of the "Fresh Start" DVDs it should be pretty easy to compare and figure our what is going on.

I haven't really gone much further as testing requires blowing everything away over and over.

Rather than screwing around with it still I just did a fresh install of WIN7 and then grabbed the drivers and software from the recovery DVDs and made an image with Acronis.

 

Everyone says this computer is heavily laden with bloatware but I didn't see much. Aside from the usual norton and a few other apps it only took me a few minutes to uninstall. Am I missing anything else. (Aside from the Vaio apps for media).

 

That sounds like a good idea, but it would be nice to mod the Sony disk that little bit more to actually be useful...

I would love to see how Sony adds the bloat, and to simply mode the unattended file to remove it, instead of having to stuff around with a clean install and getting all the drivers to work correctly, or the other way, where you remove everything, but still have bits and pieces that you can truly never get rid of.

What VAIO do you have BTW? I am working with the new Z.

 

Is it possible to install a stand alone matching OS and put the sony product key in? Then just go to Sony's website and retrieve all the drivesr.

 

I 100% agree! That was what I was going after. I wanted to be able to do a "fresh" recovery on the Sony Recovery Partition as a start and then add my own pak and wim files.

I am pretty confident that at least on the VPCZ11FHX DVDs there is no special flag in any xml that effectively "disables" bloatware install. It is all chained together. The pain in "trapping" where this is happening is because Sony isn't using just simple wim files. They use mod files that are extracted to your drive. The contents don't contain any special batch files just the program setup.

For a WIN7 AIK to work properly the last thing you do is install "everything else". This means the bloat install at this point. The unattended.xml and oobe are charged with handling that. However in Sony's files there is no reference to anything special. I suspect it calls some batch or xml file in some mod file someplace. It is a real pain. Again having the fresh install DVDs would make this real easy.

But for me, I am working on my own WIN7 AIK with my own software. Integrating the VAIO CARE should be pretty easy. The recovery partition is mounted as a VHD (virtual hard drive) inside on WIN7. Microsoft provides great detail on how vendors can have their own "recovery partitions" but they do have to follow guidelines.

The basic OS image (sony.wim) contains basic drivers. The Sony shared lib, nvidia + intel drivers, LAN and several others... but not all of them. So with that being said.. You can just lay down the sony.wim file using imagex (don't forget to inject language files) on a new partition while still maintaining the recovery and windows recovery partitions and have a "clean" install. You can achieve the same affect by doing the install from the DVDs and stopping after the 1st or going through the recovery process and as soon as you see the 1st bloat item open up the task scheduler (CTRL+SFT+ESC) and kill audit.exe. That will kill the install and bring you into WIN7 where the OOBE screen will come up.

Laying down the sony.wim is crazy fast. I used a USB key to hold the wim file and it takes 3 mins to lay it down.

 

I agree.

Is there someone out there with fresh start who you like to help out maybe?

 

I believe this is not possible. Sony and others use special OEM versions of WIN7 that are self activated. However it should be possible to use any version of windows and install your SLIC and you would be go to go.

Also.. there is a tool (search the web) that will back up your license data and reinstall it. I haven't tried this on a non-OEM version so I can not tell you if it works or not.

I have a lifetime MSDN Universal Subscription (not available anymore.. I think they call it "Ultimate" or something now) so product access and licensing is not really an issue for me otherwise I would have probably spent more time looking into this as well. Sorry.

 

BTW, what sort of programs that you are looking forward to install from the Sony Recovery DVD?

 

BTW if you look in windows/panther and windows/system32/oobe and you will see what I mean. At first I was like "This is going to be SOO easy!"... After about 70 hours of trying to 'make it easy' it definitely was not so. Well at least for me it was not. I am not an 'expert' in WIN7 automated installs but have a pretty good understanding.

 

I do have my recovery DVDs... but...

As much of the "stock" stuff as possible. There are several things on the DVDs that are not available for download. Just a couple off the top of my head are the wallpaper, wallpaper setting tool, vaio window organizer, WINDVD, ARCsot magic-i, Roxio.. I think those are the main useful items. The rest is available for download.

I can extract all the Sony files with no issues. WINDVD, Roxio, etc. install perfectly fine on a new WIN7 install (non OEM non SONY key). So really just making your own unattended install is probably easier. A "custom" recovery partition should not be too difficult either as Microsoft has documented how do to this with WINPE.

For me at least it was much easier and straigforward to do a fresh install and everything "just so" and then image all the partitions and re-install anything special.

BTW.. what BMW do you have? I just blew the engine in my M3. Is at the dealer right now.

 

It's a 335i. How can you blow your engine?? Are you into racing?

For my own education do you use imagex to extract all the Sony files/apps?

 

I guess it depends how you look at it. Even when you uninstall software they do not do a very good job of removing EVERYTHING from the registry... Mostly things are left in the CLASSES key.

I actually did several installs and removed the software with Revo and Total Uninstall only to hose up something else.

But honestly I seriously doubt there is THAT much difference between doing what you did (just install stuff and a fresh install). We are talking a very small amount of registry data and possibly some lingering files someplace on your system.

For me I didn't want any of the Sony Media stuff at all.. But even uninstalling that again I doubt there is that much difference.

I also took the liberty of disabling 8dot3 names right after WIN7 installed to prevent any registry entries pointing to short names as well. You can check yourself using the fsutil 8dot3name scan command.

The main thing is that if it is fast enough and everything is working for you then why bother?

 

I did a scan and found 5 8dot3 names. Would you please let me know why disabling 8dot3 names is necessary?

 

How? Well these things happens. Its an 09 with 5900 miles. But yes I do enjoy racing... very much so. Ferrari's and BMW's. Hit me up in PM if you want and I'll shoot you my FB ID.

imagex is actually Microsoft's tool believe it or not. They are doing away with the typical unattended install and moving more towards imaging. imagex is similar to Ghost.

It is part of the WIN7 AIK. It is 1.7GB and you can grab it from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...65-9f76-4177-a811-39c26d3b3b34&displaylang=en

The kit will also allow you to import and catalog the wim files and mess around with that stuff.

As far as extracting and converting the Sony files/apps... That I can't take credit for. These guys pretty much sum it all up!

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=318134

All of their information is based on Vista however almost all of it is applicable to WIN7 as well. mod2wim is the tool you are looking for. This will extract and convert either stuff on your recovery partition or DVD's to wim files. The wim files can either then be extracted using 7zip or imported and cataloged with the WIN7 AIK tools.

 

Thanks for the information

Nice machine you have. Personally I am not into racing but do enjoy the adrenaline rush when I push the pedal....

 

Honestly... it really isn't. Everyone will debate and say that it is way faster and so on and so forth... The reality is that is makes little to no difference in practice.

Most companies turn it off for security reasons rather than for performance. For me it just prevents clutter... but I'm weird so don't put stock in that.

You should have more than that. Make sure you use the recursive flag. fsutil 8dot3name /s c:\

 

OMG!! 54,774 8dot3 names found....

 

Hehehe...

Seriously.. don't even worry about that. You really don't have that much.

I turned mine off right after the WIN7 install and here is mine:

Total files and directories scanned: 139533
Total 8dot3 names found: 48644
Total 8dot3 names stripped: 0

Don't give it a second thought.

 

I am able to extract all WIMs from the recovery disk and the list of "bloatwares" and drivers. Thanks for your help, Digital Jedi Rx.

 

I think to progress this we need a user with freshstart cd's. Comparing the 2 would be a good start. In theory a freshstart user will have one unattended file different, and that will be it.

 

Hey np...

Now separating them out during the install... that is another matter

 

The closest I got to a clean install was doing a fresh restore and allowing all to do as it was suppose to. I then uninstalled all software I no longer wanted. I then rebooted into a recovery console and replaced the reg hive files with the ones from the sony.wim. After replacing all, the system just kept rebooting. I then went back and restored the origional hive files, all was fine. So I started over again and just replaced the software hive file. All was fine. I thin replaced the system hive file, system would no boot. So I placed the origional back. So for the most purpose, I had a clean install. My system only loaded with roughly 30 process compared to 80 something. At the moment I do not have much more time to dig into the reg hives to determine why after replacing system it would not boot.

Another thing I attempted was just copying over the the entire contents of the sony wim onto c:, now with this method however it would not boot, my only thinking is that the boot record needs a look into or something in the registry hives need modifying.

 

This is my first VAIO and believe me I will work in efforts to thelp undertsand Son'ys recovery. I have found patents by Sony regarding there modular recover setup, which I will get around to reading soon.

 

that is good news. Even if we don't solve this issue, it would be nice to have information for people to try later.

 

A list of softwares/drivers on the Recovery Disk (ex Sony.wim)

 

That is very interesting...

You must have a Euro model? USA models get Symantec instead of McAfee.

Now I am curious... You got those OUT of the sony.wim? Really curious...

In my sony.wim it is WIN7 and a very basic set of drivers.

 

Are you doing a straight copy or are you using imagex?

 

It's an Australia Z11. The folders are extracted from all wims except sony.wim.

 

Just happened to look on this thread and it looks very interesting will keep an eye on this one.

And just for giggles I am also a BMW owner

 

Birds of a feather...