Vista Installation Issues

I heard a few people encounter missing certain features after the
Vista install. Some of these may just be that users do not know how to
use some of the features (i.e. missing side bar is usually one of
those), but I did notice one item that is missing on my install.

Whenever I boot Vista and it gives me the splash screen with the small
progress bar (before the Vista Orb comes up), I am missing the Windows
logo. All I have is the progress bar with (C) Microsoft under it.
Anyone else have this? I am running Vista Ultimate. Our IT person at
work is dual-booting XP and Vista Business Premium and he sure as heck
has the Windows logo on the splash screen.

This certainly doesn't bother me or makes me want to re-install, but
does make me feel better that I am dual-booting, because who knows
what else got screwed up during the install. I've had no issues so far
though and not a single crash/lock up.

On 6/26/2007 8:29 AM On a whim, CJW pounded out on the keyboard

> I heard a few people encounter missing certain features after the
> Vista install. Some of these may just be that users do not know how to
> use some of the features (i.e. missing side bar is usually one of
> those), but I did notice one item that is missing on my install.
>
> Whenever I boot Vista and it gives me the splash screen with the small
> progress bar (before the Vista Orb comes up), I am missing the Windows
> logo. All I have is the progress bar with (C) Microsoft under it.
> Anyone else have this? I am running Vista Ultimate. Our IT person at
> work is dual-booting XP and Vista Business Premium and he sure as heck
> has the Windows logo on the splash screen.
>
> This certainly doesn't bother me or makes me want to re-install, but
> does make me feel better that I am dual-booting, because who knows
> what else got screwed up during the install. I've had no issues so far
> though and not a single crash/lock up.
>

Hi CJ,

I believe that is usually caused by a corrupted bitmap in the Windows
folder, since I've run across it before in XP. They may have changed
the file names, but in XP the files were:
winnt.bmp
winnt256.bmp

Do a *.bmp search and see what is in the Windows folder. Try copying
copies from the working workstation to the other one and see if it changes.

--
Terry R.

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What you are seeing is normal Vista behaviour. When Vista boots, you should
get a very plain screen with a green-ish progress bar and"Copyright
Microsoft" - nothing else, no logo etc. This is as Microsoft intended, it's
"by design".

Not sure why your IT guy is getting a logo but I'd guess his boot files are
reading the XP copy of ntoskrnl.exe (where the logo resides).

Hope it helps,
Andrew

> I believe that is usually caused by a corrupted bitmap in the Windows
> folder, since I've run across it before in XP. They may have changed the
> file names, but in XP the files were:
> winnt.bmp
> winnt256.bmp

Apologies for being a clever-dick, but I respectfully disagree. This is
incorrect.

Actually this would have been correct for Windows NT: this did store the
boot logo data as a winnt256.bmp file. But in Windows XP, the boot logo is
contained entirely as a Resource within the ntoskrnl.exe file. The only way
you can change the logo on XP is by editing this binary file (not
recommended, since it is part of the kernel).

During the Vista beta, the forum was full of people asking "What's happened
to my boot logo, all I get is this crummy little progress bar??". The answer
from the Microsoft guys was that this new minimalist design is intentional.
Apparently it's the brain-child of the Marketing dudes: it's got some weird
importance for brand recognition, or something.

The filename "winnt256.bmp" ws used for some trojans on Windows XP - if you
do find such a file, run your anti-virus scanner!

Cheers
Andrew

On 6/26/2007 5:09 PM On a whim, Andrew McLaren pounded out on the keyboard

>> I believe that is usually caused by a corrupted bitmap in the Windows
>> folder, since I've run across it before in XP. They may have changed the
>> file names, but in XP the files were:
>> winnt.bmp
>> winnt256.bmp
>
> Apologies for being a clever-dick, but I respectfully disagree. This is
> incorrect.
>
> Actually this would have been correct for Windows NT: this did store the
> boot logo data as a winnt256.bmp file. But in Windows XP, the boot logo is
> contained entirely as a Resource within the ntoskrnl.exe file. The only way
> you can change the logo on XP is by editing this binary file (not
> recommended, since it is part of the kernel).
>
> During the Vista beta, the forum was full of people asking "What's happened
> to my boot logo, all I get is this crummy little progress bar??". The answer
> from the Microsoft guys was that this new minimalist design is intentional.
> Apparently it's the brain-child of the Marketing dudes: it's got some weird
> importance for brand recognition, or something.
>
> The filename "winnt256.bmp" ws used for some trojans on Windows XP - if you
> do find such a file, run your anti-virus scanner!
>
> Cheers
> Andrew
>

Andrew,

I suggest you find an XP workstation and look for the files in the
Windows folder. If they're within ntoskrnl.exe, why are they included
at all? I just checked 5 workstations and all of them contain both
files, dated 8/18/2001. These were all clean installs, not upgrades.

I did a little research on your comment and found this:
"Microsoft decided to remove the pallet from the logo to another
location (in XP). So now when you open up ntoskrnl.exe in Resource
Hacker, the .bmps are just black images."

--
Terry R.

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"Terry R." <> wrote ...
> I suggest you find an XP workstation and look for the files in the Windows
> folder. If they're within ntoskrnl.exe, why are they included

Okay, now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty stuff ... :-)

Yes: those winnt.bmp and winnt256.bmp files are present in the Windows
folder on XP. But normally they're hidden files, and should not appear to
casual snooping users. It is trivially easy to demonstrate they are not used
as boot logo pictures in any straightforward way: edit winnt256.bmp using
Paintbrush or whatever, save the changes, and reboot. Does the logo reflect
your changes? - no. You can also totally delete these files, with no impact
on how the system boots. So they don't appear to play any critical role in
booting.

I don't know exactly why those files are present. I suspect it may have
something to do with backwards compatibility (maybe some software assumes
these files will be present?); or else, some aspect of system file
protection (SFC) for the ntoskrnl.exe file.

If you open ntoskrnl.exe (or nrknlpa.exe) using any tool which can edit
resources in EXE files - such as Visual Studio - the boot logo images are
there, plain to see, in the Resource section of the file. On SP2, the big
Windows logo is bitmap number 5, of 11 bitmaps. I'm staring at it, as I
type.

If you edit Bitmap 5 in ntoskrnl.exe, then Windows\winnt256.bmp is
automatically updated with the changes (why? I dunno). However, SFC will
kick in and immediately replace the edited ntoskrnl.exe file with the cached
genuine copy; so when you reboot, the boot logo still appears the same as
before.

> I did a little research on your comment and found this:
> "Microsoft decided to remove the pallet from the logo to another location
> (in XP). So now when you open up ntoskrnl.exe in Resource Hacker, the
> .bmps are just black images."

The "pallet" (palette?) is just a look-up table of RGB colour values, which
an image editor can use to adjust the colours of a bitmap. When you open a
BMP file in Paintbrush for example, it uses a simple "normal" set of RGB
values. In XP, Microsoft have obfuscated the boot logo resources somewhat,
by using a reversed set of RGB colour values in the embedded resources. So
royal blue is normally 0x41 0x69 0xE1, in the embedded boot logo bitmap it
is 0xE1 0x69 0x41. The palette for these "reversed colours" is itself
embedded into ntoskrnl.exe. When the bitmap is examined using the standard
palette, they appear all black. At boot-time, XP uses its built-in boot
palette in ntoskrnl.exe to interpret the colours in the embedded resource,
thus displaying the colourful image we see on the screen.

The main thing is: Windows NT used winnt.bmp and winnt256.bmp as the splash
screen logos in a fairly simple, obvious manner. If you editing the BMP file
on disk and rebooted NT, you'd see the changes in your logon screen (I used
to make my NT workstation boot "OS/2" this way :-). But Microsoft - or at
least, some forces within Microsoft - wanted tighter control over the
branding of Windows: letting users modify their start-up screens was
allegedly "diluting" the value of the Windows brand. So in Windows 2000, the
logo was moved from a discrete BMP file, easily modified by users, to an
internal binary resource, quite difficult for users to access or change. XP
and Vista may have modified this mechanism in various ways (eg by
obfuscating the palette); but the basic prinicple remains the same.

Returning to the original poster's question: nothing that happens to any
winnt.bmp or winnt256.bmp file would prevent the XP boot logo from
appearing. But what they are describing - the minimalist boot screen with
progress bar - is normal boot behaviour for Vista, anyway.

Hope this makes sense!
Andrew