[Intro]
Every Windows user, when he turns on his computer, sees that same screen - the boot screen.
Boot screen has changed a great many times over the years, and over the years a group of people has been formed who get nostalgic feelings from looking at the boot screen of any system.
Previously, the Windows startup image could be easily modified because it was seamlessly stored in one file - ntoskrnl.exe
Eventually, after Windows Vista was released, the boot loader changed from the NTLDR that was in Windows NT systems to a new one called Windows Boot Manager, or BOOTMGR.
If in Windows Vista there was just a loading bar on a black background with Microsoft Corporation written on it, ...
...with Windows 7 came the inscription "Starting Windows" and a full frame animation, which loops from a certain point.
Starting with Windows 8, Windows Boot Manager has received many new features, from a completely new design to full support for UEFI systems.
The funny thing is that the old boot loader design is still there, but it hidden and shown only then, ...
...when the video card does not support the updated technology WDDM - Windows Display Driver Model, which appeared in the beta versions of Windows Vista: Windows Longhorn.
You can change the logo at system startup, but it depends on the platform of your PC: Legacy (BIOS); or UEFI.
If you have Legacy, all variants of the modern Windows boot loader logo are located in the C:\Windows\Boot\Resources\bootres.dll.
Later, you have to edit the permissions for the file, then open it all up and change it through Resource Hacker or some other program, and manually change all the variants.
And in the case of UEFI systems, everything is much easier: everything can be done almost in two clicks, through a separate program called HackBGRT, ...
...which opens up the EFI partition of Windows and changes the logo to the desired one, which must be in .bmp format, and I made a video about this program back in 2020.
But we will go further.
We're going to make the boot loader look like we're running Windows XP, and make it look so real that you can prank a friend with it.
So, let's start.
Be warned that all actions are performed on a virtual machine. If you want to repeat this on a real computer, you do it all at your own risk.
Any sloppy movement or unconscious action increases the likelihood of total system breaking.
We are now looking at the original Windows 11 and to get started we need the file ntoskrnl.exe, which we copy from the System32 folder, for example, to the desktop.
We will name the file ntoskrnl.exe slightly differently, because we will not replace the original file, but move it to the same folder from which we took everything originally.
Now we have to open our file with Resource Hacker and there we look for the Bitmap folder, as it is of most interest to us.
Looking through the contents of this folder and seeing most of them just some black squares, you ask "but what is it and what's the fun?
So, I telling.
This file is the kernel of the system and it contains parts of the boot loader - in XP, we can see from the pictures that they contain a progress bar, an inscription a la "It's now safe to turn off your computer" and the logo of the system itself.
And this is only a folder with bitmaps
In addition to all this, the BSOD is based on this file.
Starting with Windows Vista, the boot screen has changed slightly in appearance, but has fundamentally changed from the inside: instead of the NT Loader, which has served since the first Windows NT, ...
...Windows Boot Manager, the boot loader that appeared in Vista and is still in use today, is now available.
And in recent versions of Windows, almost all the old pictures in ntoskrnl.exe are bluntly blacked out.
Now let's proceed with the replacement.
From the folder "XP bitmaps" first take the first picture and replace the first picture in the folder - this will be just the XP boot screen.
Next, we replace the fourth picture, which will be the bars that are shown when the system is booting.
Save the file and do not immediately copy it to the folder System32!
Before this you need to work with the configuration of the loader - clone the boot option, set the necessary parameters and specify the path to the modified file.
To do this, we open a CMD as administrator and enter "bcdedit" first, without any parameters.
When you run the utility without any parameters, we are immediately shown a list of boot configurations from the BCD file.
By default, there are only two items here: the Windows Boot Manager itself and your OS that is installed right now.
Here we can see the path to the boot file, the item ID, the localization, the path to the system folder and other information.
In fact, we need to make a clone of our first element, so as not to affect the main one.
So we write the command bcdedit /copy {current}, and after that we add at the end "/d and "Windows XP" in quotes.
As I said above, this will make a clone of the boot configuration item, and the /d parameter will set the name that we entered - in our case it is "Windows XP"
Next, we need to return the text boot menu from the XP/Vista era for our copied configuration item.
To do this, we need to copy the ID of our clone, type bcdedit /set, right-click and paste that ID and write bootmenupolicy Legacy. [bcdedit /set (ID) bootmenupolicy Legacy]
After that, enter the same command, but at the end change it to graphicsmodedisabled 1 [bcdedit /set (ID) graphicsmodedisabled 1]
Finally, we specify the path to our rebuilt kernel - in our case it is xpkrnl.exe, and we put the file in the System32 folder.
After all these actions and commands, we proceed to changing the configuration of the bootloader itself, that is, to change the Windows Boot Manager.
We enter just one command there: displaybootmenu 1 [bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu 1]
This command will enable the system selection menu to be displayed for booting each time the PC starts up.
And after rebooting we won't see the Windows boot screen, but first we will see the following: we are asked to select the system to be booted.
Actually here is Windows 11 with the original settings and our choice with the name Windows XP, which we created with our own hands :3
But do not press Enter right away, on the version with Windows XP, we press F8 and as you can see, we are faced with the old boot options from the era of Windows XP and Vista.
Here we need to select "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement". Select it and look at the result.
Beautiful, isn't it?
The loading screen is from Windows XP, but Windows 11 is starting up.
We can reboot the system and run it again to show the fact that there is no cheating here.
However, if you run it immediately, without F8, the system immediately detects the switch and tries to restore - not very cool, is it?
Why this happens is unknown, but if you know, write your opinions in the comments
[although if you think about it, it looks like we damaged the digital signature while editing the file; but I'm still interested to hear your opinion]
If over time you get bored with the loading screen or you just don't like it, you can easily remove it.
To do this, open a CMD as an administrator; type bcdedit; find the ID of the item you were adding and type bcdedit /delete and type the ID of that item. [bcdedit /delete (ID)]
And after removing it from the bootloader, disable the appearance of selecting the system to boot with the command bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu 0
Reboot and you're done.
What can I say in the end?
This modification is unlikely to make practical sense, but if it is for some kind of entertainment or fun, then why not.
And then all of a sudden I burst in, because Daniel forgot to specify another nuance with this file.
If you play, for example, games from Epic Games or Valve, then you just do not pass in online games.
Because the anti-cheat notices that you have replaced the Windows kernel file
So replacing the boot screen with the XP boot screen is just for fun... just to play around...
What do you think about it? Write in the comments.
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