Portable Daemon Tools-like program

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Paxophobe
Posts: 10
Joined: Wed Jul 08, 2009 4:23 pm

Re:

#16 Post by Paxophobe »

smartygeek wrote:Actually, I just thought of a way to make it portable. (This would only work if the person has Administrator rights) You could have a launcher that would launch Virtual CDRom Control Panel. (I am just using this program as an example) But before it launches that, it could launch a batch file that might be something like this:

copy "G:\Portable Virtual CDRom Control Panel\VCdRom.sys" "%systemroot%\system32\drivers\VCdRom.sys"

(Assuming G: is your portable drive)

Then when you exit the program, it could run another batch file that is something like this:

del "%systemroot%\system32\drivers\VCdRom.sys"

Do you think it will work?

Install/Uninstall driver are available in the Driver Control panel of "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel". However, running a cmd file, depending on the exe, will stall the execution of the cmd file while the Exe is open.

Try this by putting it in the directory as RunPortable.cmd

copy /y VcdRom.sys "%windir%\system32\drivers"
VcdControlTool.exe
del /q "%windir%\system32\drivers\VcdRom.sys"
pause

You'll see that it doesn't get to the del portion of the script until you close VcdControlTool.exe

You can use Hstart.exe with the /noconsole switch to hide the command prompt, too.

knightcoders
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Sep 28, 2009 1:05 pm

Re: Portable Daemon tools like program?

#17 Post by knightcoders »

I can Mount/Unmount files from my portable drive without installing device drivers, however, I cannot get the Daemon Tools sptd.sys Driver to load...

Anyway, here is how....
Download a program called FreeOTFE from here http://www.FreePTFE.org
Unzip it to your portable drive.
Copy only the programs device driver (.sys) files to the x86 folder that you want loaded.
Copy the the other program files to your portable drive.

When you start FreeOTFE in portable mode, it will automatically load the sys drivers.
You can also use the command line options to use silent mode.

NOTE....
In order to copy the program sys files to make the program portable, I used Microsoft SteadyState or ThinApp and installed the program first on my Windows XP computer. Then I found a utility called HoboCopy that will shadow copy the sys files that are "in use". Once I copied all the program files to my portable drive, I reset my Windows XP computer back to the original state and tested the program from the portable drive.

I've been able to get most virtual drive programs to work, but Daemon Tools sptd.sys driver will not load for some reason.

Here are the Programs that do work from my portable drive without installing drivers!
ISODisk
UltraISO
VCDControlPanel
VirtualCloneDrive

If anyone can figure out why DaemonTools sptd.sys will not load and get it working let me know!

Theoretically, you can use this method to load any device drivers, scanners, printers, etc. but I haven't tried it.

If someone has the time, please let me know! This would be awesome!

freakazoid
Posts: 1212
Joined: Wed Jul 18, 2007 5:45 pm

Re: Portable Daemon tools like program?

#18 Post by freakazoid »

Interesting approach, knightcoders.

I might have to look into this when I have the time!
is it stealth? ;)

kuihdez
Posts: 94
Joined: Sat Jun 07, 2008 4:32 am

Re: Portable Daemon tools like program?

#19 Post by kuihdez »

Thanks man, i was looking into it and it doesn't seem to support many file formats.

magic iso ? DWF ? NRG ?

daemon tools is more wide

besides, i just use portable winrar to unrar all the files inside the image, or portable magic iso to extract them

what's your update on this ?

Boris
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2010 3:46 am

Portable Daemon Tools-like program

#20 Post by Boris »

I found a similar thread to this from last year, but I thought I would refine my question with a bit of a story.

I am a high school student in Australia, and one of my classes is Information Processes and Technologies... pretty much computer programming.

One of our units is to create a game as a class, as would a small computer games company would do. We all work on our own projects until we come up with a completed game. Ours is an RPG sort of idea, very, very simple as far as they go, but it allows LAN play. To complete the assessment we have to create a finished copy on a CD/DVD and it would have to play like any other major computer game, i.e. install from this CD and then run from an .exe.

There are 15 people in the class, so to test it out we want to install it and play a LAN game (fun lesson, right? :D). It appears some idiot in the class has, however, mucked around with our few months work and we have only the original 1 working CD in the class, the first and only we created.

Now you can see the problem... 15 people (20 people can play LAN, and we want to test out that it can run that many) and 1 disc. And we really don't want to burn that many copies if it is faulty.

At home I have found the easiest thing to do is just mount the .iso in Daemon Tools (or similar) and it runs fine. However there is no way I'm having 15 geeks in my house with their computers, as the school doesn't allow that sort of program to be installed on the restricted access computers there.

So my question is, is there a portable program such as this that would enable us to just have copies of on our USB and be able to mount multiple copies of the .iso and run it off the school computers?

If so, I'm also thinking many, many hours playing games at school when we should be working :lol:

Any suggestions welcome, as a class we decided this was probably the best way to do it, unless you guys have a better idea.

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tproli
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Re: Portable Daemon Tools like program

#21 Post by tproli »

Well, maybe someone will come up with a better solution but what about mounting iso images to virtual operating systems (e.g. with Virtualbox)?

Spinaltapt
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2010 7:39 am

Re: Portable Daemon Tools like program

#22 Post by Spinaltapt »

If you are using XP you could try VCdControlTool.exe available free but unsupported from microsoft.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... nel_21.exe

works with W2K3 Server too, I use it all the time on customers sites as a portable VCD app were i dont want to install somthing like deamon tools on to there server, when i need to run updates etc. Its really usefull as i keep all my CD's and DVD's as ISO's on the laptop and also many 1U Servers dont even have an optical drive installed anyway. It has just 1 dependant file vcdrom.sys but that can stay on your portable device in the same directory as the exe file.
and as a bonus it all wieghs in at about 30KB total size.

The install instructions tell you to copy the vcd.sys driver to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder. but this is not necicary as the vcd controll panel allows you to specify the location of the driver from the driver controll button.

In your situation you will need to have your teacher's and school's ICT manager's agreement before downloading and using this software. It is free and from recolection there is no specific EULA so given the circumstances it should be OK with them.

I work as an ICT consultant to many educational institutions in the UK and it is standard practice in the UK to provide students on such courses were software development is being taught with a sandbox environment (controlled access to a vmware machine through the students profile or a simaler type of setup).
Presumably your not in a sandbox so it is likely your schools network manager will need to exclude the exe and sys file from the networks policy restrictions for it to run from anywere, again you will need to discuss that with the network manager .

Boris
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2010 3:46 am

Re: Portable Daemon Tools like program

#23 Post by Boris »

tproli wrote:Well, maybe someone will come up with a better solution but what about mounting iso images to virtual operating systems (e.g. with Virtualbox)?
Not quite sure what Virtualbox is I'm afraid. I'm not completely up to date with everything, still bit of a noob with quite a few things.

Boris
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2010 3:46 am

Re: Portable Daemon Tools like program

#24 Post by Boris »

Spinaltapt wrote:If you are using XP you could try VCdControlTool.exe available free but unsupported from microsoft.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... nel_21.exe

works with W2K3 Server too, I use it all the time on customers sites as a portable VCD app were i dont want to install somthing like deamon tools on to there server, when i need to run updates etc. Its really usefull as i keep all my CD's and DVD's as ISO's on the laptop and also many 1U Servers dont even have an optical drive installed anyway. It has just 1 dependant file vcdrom.sys but that can stay on your portable device in the same directory as the exe file.
and as a bonus it all wieghs in at about 30KB total size.

The install instructions tell you to copy the vcd.sys driver to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder. but this is not necicary as the vcd controll panel allows you to specify the location of the driver from the driver controll button.

In your situation you will need to have your teacher's and school's ICT manager's agreement before downloading and using this software. It is free and from recolection there is no specific EULA so given the circumstances it should be OK with them.

I work as an ICT consultant to many educational institutions in the UK and it is standard practice in the UK to provide students on such courses were software development is being taught with a sandbox environment (controlled access to a vmware machine through the students profile or a simaler type of setup).
Presumably your not in a sandbox so it is likely your schools network manager will need to exclude the exe and sys file from the networks policy restrictions for it to run from anywere, again you will need to discuss that with the network manager .
At this school the restrictions aren't that 'restrictive'. As long as it's on a portable device, pretty much anything can be run off of it, as long as it doesn't attempt to install anything on the computer itself. We've managed similar sorts of things before and no fuss was raised about it, but still the IT guy will be fine with everything. Seriously restrictions aren't that much at all. Kids find ways around things and install large games such as Halo onto the local hard drives and play them, much to the teacher's knowledge. Australian schools in small towns are very relaxed when it comes to what is 'right' and 'wrong' :D, but anyway tangent there.

So this program can be installed and run entirely off of a portable device (in my case a portable hard drive, in others on thumb drives) with not too much fussing around beforehand to get it to do so?

Thanks for the replies.

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webfork
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Location: US, Texas
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Re: Portable Daemon Tools-like program

#25 Post by webfork »

Old thread update: I pulled up an old ISO saved to a thumbdrive today using PassMark OSFMount and it worked beautifully.

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