Change icons in Acronis OS Selector?

[luxmen]

WOUAAA :-)

 

I'm so HAPPY

 

Thx a lot for that cbmkgd

 

I use your method 0 and it Work SO FINE !!!

 

 

I've just one question :

 

Is ot possible to translate text in Fullscreen mode ?

I'm french, and i just would like to change operating systems by other text or delet completly..and Turn off computer by other text...

 

Possible for You to Help me ?

 

Thx for all :-) with U, my system is beautifull

[cbmkgd]

Checking in the xml files, maybe something can be done about the text "operating systems"; but not so sure about the "turn off" button. I'll do some tests later.

Je t'en donnerai des nouvelles/I'll get back to you.

 

If you can get your hands on a localized/french version that might solve part of your problem; but you would have to try method3 then...

[cbmkgd]

Ok, was able to change Operating Systems to Système d'exploitation in the ossmain.xml file within the zip package; it's on lines 94-96, and those lines have to be changed to:

<group xmlns:acronis="http://www.acronis.com/XSL" name="group_os" title="Systemes d'exploitation" verb="group_os">

i.e. you only change the content of title=...

Method 1 has to be used here though.

 

As for Turn off computer, it is unfortunately written in ossmain.msg which contains many strings pertaining to the GUI. It IS possible to change those strings, and was able to change the one you mentioned with Éteindre Système. I say unfortunate because one must use caution here: the lenght of the changed string might have to be of less or equal amount of characters than the ones to replace. You'll notice my translation is shorter than the original (in fact, i've padded the difference with spaces so the length is exactly the same). The other problem is that characters (including spaces) are separated with nulls, so you have to use an hex editor an be carefull only to edit the non-null bytes (I think so: I haven't tried testing how accurate are my above apprehensions).

I've also managed to change the string Select the operating system to boot to Sélectionner le système désiré, which appear in full screen mode when none is chosen. Again, translation suffered from length limitation.

In fact, one could do a lenghty translation just by changing all the string in ossmain.msg. Which I won't do of course! Again I'd propose rather to get a french version at this place for example. Too bad all these strings were not put in xml files with a modern gui that refers to them: would have been easier for localisation.

 

[luxmen]

SO COOL,

 

Many Thanks cbmkgd....i'm very happy !!

 

I go to try to change the Turn off computer file... but i'm no sure i can... (newb in hex editor)

 

big ThX to u !

[cbmkgd]

I had success using Method 3 with AOSS 9.0.524, so I edited the methods post to reflect this.

Also removed now unnecessary mentions of pirated version of aoss.

Might eventually replace the utilities with more universal ones (no md5/version check) if I have more time.

[soccerdude21490]

so I ahve the exact same version as you guys all have, and I have YET to find ossmain.exe! I've looked all over my harddrive, and searched everywhere... I even uninstalled and resinstalled and still nothing

 

anyone help?

[cbmkgd]

Do a search, and make sure it searches for hidden files/folders.

 

BTW, already have something done for newer 2160 version, but encountered a little glitch. Will be done soon though.

[snakeman]

Hey can we get it to work on 64bit versions of windows(XP/Vista) also! I had no success with either. But your methods worked great with MCE 2005!

 

 

snakeman

Edited March 15, 2007 by snakeman

[cbmkgd]

I don't think Acronis Disk Director is installable in a 64bit os yet.

 

Have you tried installing AOSS from the Acronis Bootable Media? You'd need to install acronis disk director first of course: seems like a vicious circle, but in fact you could do that in a virtual 32bit winxp (eg in vmware, or free ms virtualpc). Once disk director is installed there, you create the bootable media, you burn it, then reboot on that cd.

 

You could then install aoss in its a small fat32 partition containing no os (eg a small logical partition). AOSS bootmanager itself doesn't need a host os.

[AcidRain9]

any luck with the 2160 version?

[cbmkgd]

I've done the 10.0.2160 version (which also works for versions 9 through 10.0.2160 in fact) more than a week ago. But I'm looking into a small problem; at worst, it will require the user to reactivate the aoss install. I'll try to see if there's a way to avoid this, and make sure (in vmware) that there's no other problems.

So, maybe this weekend.

 

But if you're really in a hurry, Method 3, the manual method involving searching for the pkzip head and doing some hex editing oneself, works.

When you have replaced the ossmain.exe, if you reboot you might receive an error message. If that happens, you should reboot on the Acronis Bootable CD and reactivate (not reinstall!) AOSSelector.

[snakeman]

Hey can we get it to work on 64bit versions of windows(XP/Vista) also! I had no success with either. But your methods worked great with MCE 2005!

 

 

snakeman

 

 

 

 

2160 supports Vista acronis works with 64bit version I just can't use your util to change the icons. The applications just keeps starting over until I hit esc a few times.

 

 

Thanks,

[cbmkgd]

ok, you mean my little executables.

Might take a look at the compiler, or maybe it's the zip/unzip exe's which are problematic; but in any case, you could use the manual method with your preferred hex editor.

 

 

Which one did you use?

 

If you were using the 'Quick' solution, get zip231xN-x64.zip, and extract it's zip.exe file, and use it instead of the one I furnished.

 

If that doesn't help, I'll check the compiler or NSIS options.

[abandonedaccount]

cbmkgd: Thank you very much for finding the way to extract and replace icons. I just did the procedure with v10.0.2160 where I searched for the ZIP file header and split the zip and the main executable into two files. So thanks to you I was free to replace the icons.

 

However, I didn't use yours, you did an okay job with them but they are too fat to sit neatly in the selection square, and they are off to the left by two pixels which makes them misaligned as well. And I disliked the fact that the blue icons you used blend into the background almost seamlessly.

 

I scaled down the official Apple logo, cleaned up the resizing artifacts (a few sharp, white pixels), gave it a nice dark outline and then a drop shadow to round it all off. I then worked with the saturation, brightness and contrast to make the three icon variations (unselected, selected and disabled).

 

Here is a picture comparison with the icons which I've created (on the right):

 

The attached zip archive contains my icons, my photoshop files (if anyone wants to make their own changes) and the comparison file (for good measure).

chris_osx.zip

[abandonedaccount]

If anyone wants to make their own icons there are many things you need to know, but I still recommend you give it a shot if you are graphically inclined.

 

Each icon file is a PNG file with 3 copies of the icon stacked on top of each other. So for the 48x48 icons the file is 48px wide and 144px tall (3*48px). And for the 16x16 icons, it's 16px wide and 48px tall (3*16px).

 

1) "Bounds": The first rule you have to obey is to place your icons within their bounds. Make them "stick to their playfield", do not overlap the icons above or below these bounds or it is not going to work properly. In all my PSD files I've made a guide layer that puts a different background behind each icon, which visualizes the bounds of having 3 icons stacked on top of each other. If you ever wonder if your icons are within bounds, enable that layer and you can see for yourself.

 

2) "Alignment": Another thing you need to do is align your icons properly. You are going to get weird "jumping" icons if you don't. This means that you have to place all 3 icons at the same offsets. If one of them is one pixel further to the right than the others, then that one is going to make a "jump" when selected. You want your icons to stay put so enable the guideline layer and verify that all your icons sit at the same position from the top and left corners for all the three states.

 

3) "States": Yes, let's talk about "states", the final thing you need to know. Each icon file is tall because it houses three states. The top icon is the unselected icon, which is shown when the selection is not over it. The middle icon is the selected icon, for when your cursor is over the icon. And the final icon on the bottom is the "disabled"-icon, which is shown if you've disabled the OS. All three of these icons have the following guidelines that should be obeyed:

 

Unselected: The normal icon, usually the source file you started out with with no need for processing (except the initial job of making it look good at such a small size).

Selected: The same icon but with increased contrast, brightness and saturation to give it a deep "highlight"-effect.

Disabled: The same as the "unselected/normal" icon, but completely desaturated and slightly lighter or darker to make it look disabled. Making the icon lighter is the preferred guideline for all icons, but with this Apple icon I was forced to go the other way since it was so light to begin with.

 

4) "Saving": Finally, save it as a PNG file with transparency enabled. To do this, disable all background layers and have just the icons floating over a transparent background while you save it. The blue backgrounds in my files are there as a guideline while designing, and they show how the icon will look when imported into Acronis OS Selector.

 

And here's an example which puts into practice everything I've been talking about. This is the actual 48x48 icon from my set. First shown with the blue reference background, which is how the icon will look inside Acronis. To the right of it is the size reference layer enabled. It shows the resolution of each icon, the shape of the acronis button (the rounded outline), and most importantly, the different shaded backgrounds allows you to see that all your icons are aligned and within their bounds.

[cbmkgd]

Hehe... my original icon set was worse yet. The second was tolerable enough, and some had proposed to create others (which didn't happen), so I left that one as the default set, leaving to users like you to make their own.

 

Thanks for the templates, the instructions and the tips, especially the explanation for that third icon (i thought at first it could be some displacement bump map, but that didn't make sense later).

 

Too bad Acronis hasn't implemented icon customization with this new 10.0.2160 release though.

[abandonedaccount]

Thanks for the praise!

 

You are very kind to everyone, to write all these detailed instructions and even programs to perform the task of replacing the icons for them. I'm also disappointed that Acronis didn't implement the icon changing yet. It's not a tough thing to do!

 

It's kind of like how they won't let people change the menu order of the Operating Systems, yet if you go into the Acronis OS Selector partition there's a plain text XML-file where you can just change the order of the entries. They are saying that they "may" add that feature to the GUI, yet it is that simple to do manually, and it would only take them a few minutes to code.

 

[rant]

Another thing that I don't like at the moment is the "BOOTWIZ" folder on every partition. I am forced to watch those since I want to have my system set to "show all hidden and all system files" and then there's no way to get them out of view. Pretty stupid arrangement if you ask me. And they're there so that OS Selector can install multiple operating systems on the same partition. When you boot one copy of Windows, it moves the previous copy (everything, Program Files, Windows-folder, the works) into the "BOOTWIZ" folder and moves out the new copy. So they are there to let you "swap the content" and keep multiple Windows installations on one partition. But I don't use that feature and yet they force those folders on me, and even put a few system files in them.

[/rant]

 

It's little things like that that are so annoying. Yet I keep using it because I love the boot menu.

 

 

Best Regards

[cbmkgd]

Before I forget, a question: when you modified and replaced your ossmain.exe for v. 10.0.2160, upon reboot was it accepted without complaining, or did you have to re-activate AOSS with the boot cd?

 

 

It's kind of like how they won't let people change the menu order of the Operating Systems, yet if you go into the Acronis OS Selector partition there's a plain text XML-file where you can just change the order of the entries. They are saying that they "may" add that feature to the GUI, yet it is that simple to do manually, and it would only take them a few minutes to code.

For others who would have missed this procedure, there's a few details in Post #36.

At one point I thougth about coding something for this, something that would have moved the texts around to rearrange the order, but I let go: who knows what undocumented behavior might fubar the effort.

 

An alternative is to hide, and then unhide icons in the boot menu; this might change the order using AOSS's own tools.

 

 

About the BOOTWIZ's... I agree. One of the first times I installed AOSS, don't know what I did, but my Win2k partition was filled to the hilt, and I realized it's BOOTWIZ had been trying to back up all my system files, more than 3GB's worth! Had to uninstall, clean the garbage, make sure I didn't lose anything, what a mess that was.

But now that it works well I'm at least glad it saves the Windows bootsectors, although there's no need to create these hidden folders where they're not used.

 

It's little things like that that are so annoying. Yet I keep using it because I love the boot menu.

Yes, there is something to it, eye candy but also some dynamic confort. It might be something like GRUB, coupled with a few detection tools, wrapped in a usable gui (although with ugly winxp-like looks).

[abandonedaccount]

Before I forget, a question: when you modified and replaced your ossmain.exe for v. 10.0.2160, upon reboot was it accepted without complaining, or did you have to re-activate AOSS with the boot cd?

 

I copied ossmain.exe to the desktop, opened it in Hex Workshop (my favorite since 1999 ), searched for the ZIP file header PK\x03\x04 and selected from the header to the end of the file, pressed cut (ctrl+x) to make the ZIP portion into a separate file, opened a new file, pasted the contents, then saved both as ossmain.main and ossmain.zip respectively. I then extracted the ZIP file, replaced the 3 images, and recompressed it with maximum zip compression using WinRAR. The file size ended up 3kb smaller than before. I then used the DOS command prompt to merge the files: copy /b ossmain.main+ossmain.zip ossmain.exe

 

I placed it back into the BOOTWIZ folder on the Acronis OS Selector partition and overwrote the original. On my next reboot I had the new icons. No re-activation. My guess is that you are cutting at the wrong place.

[cbmkgd]

I placed it back into the BOOTWIZ folder on the Acronis OS Selector partition and overwrote the original. On my next reboot I had the new icons. No re-activation. My guess is that you are cutting at the wrong place.

No, that's not it, it's the same cutting method as always. And cutting at the wrong place could have worse results than reactivation.

Reactivation doesn't reinstall ossmain.exe, it just rewrites Acronis' own MBR so that it points to AOSS's partition to load ossmain. After that, the modified ossmain.exe acts as expected, showing the new icons.

 

Right now I've only tested in vmware, and the reactivation is only needed on some occasions right after a new ossmain.exe was created (I was doing some tests to change other stuff in the ossmain.zip!). Some new files appeared in the main bootwiz: eg x1.bin.

 

Anyway, I'll go back to testing the thing (haven't touched it in a week or so), only changing the icons, then will test in 'real' environment.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

 

(btw, that dos copy line to merge the parts is essentially what I'm using in the NSIS script... so I'm doing nothing fancy! Most of the code lines are safe-checks, as usual Glad to see somebody using the raw method and seeing there's nothing to it.)

 

(btw#2: for people out there who's looking for a nice icon, here's a nice pirate logo by gburnham. Not sure the skull would be very discernible in smaller version though.)

[snakeman]

Kewl I got it working on my xp64 box I dunno how! Its acting kinda strange though no full screen mode any more. I used method two.

 

 

snakeman

 

 

 

Just checked again and its still screwed up. I will keep working on it

 

 

snakeman

[Hiro_]

I use the method 0 and 1 and none works for me. I've than erase some file? i replace the icon images but on boot the icons are the same.

Please, someone can attach here your file already modified?

[Hiro_]

No works to me, i've the OS Selector 2117 and tried some times the 0 e 1 methods, and not works, if someone can post here the ossmain.exe.

[cbmkgd]

Not sure it would be legal to post a modified ossmain.exe (Mods? Any input on this?).

 

What do you mean "Not works to me"? What error do you get? What os are you on (winxp? winxp 64bit)?

 

Explain yourself a bit more, rather than just say "it doesn't work". Won't get much help if you're not more explicit.

[Hiro_]

Sorry i still have problem for explain my errors in english, i will try be more clear now.

 

I use Windows XP SP2 in my first HD in IDE2 and OS X 10.4.8 in my second HD2 in IDE1. At Windows XP i've Acronis OS Selector .2127. Method 0 and method 1 was executed without success, therefore the icons weren't replaced. When i restart and the OS Selector open on boot the icons weren't replaced, they're the same icons.