| Current mood: |  frustrated |
Windows boot-up text mode
SO... Not many Windows users will be aware of this, unless the've ever felt the need to do a boot-time defrag or CHKDSK or whatever, but when you first power up your PC, and Windows (be it 2000, XP or even presumably Vista) is showing that dreary start-up screen with the progress bar, it's actually hiding from you an awful lot of interesting and potentially useful stuff that could have been displayed instead. There's a way you can tell Windows to stop hiding its light under a bushel all that crap under the carpet, so that next time you boot up you get a good old-fashioned VGA text box, with 25 rows of text in columns of 80 characters, and you can see what's going on.
And text will crawl slowly up this screen, one line at a time, until something appears that peaks your interest that you *really* want to take a closer look at... wherupon a sudden flurry of output (probably exactly 25 lines of it, knowing my luck) will push the interesting lines of text off the top of the screen before you can even reach for your monocle. Damn!
Since it's a very basic VGA text mode display - the one thing that all graphics cards the world over are mandatorily able to display without problems - there's no way to scroll back and see what you missed.
But... there are other VGA text modes that would help: Modes with more characters on a line (so that lines don't wrap so early or so often), or with more lines: a choice of 43 or 50, in fact. Either would do me.
Now, back in the good old days of the Win9x series, telling Windows to use one of these alternative text mdes during boot-up was a doddle, 'cos the boot up process was actually a DOS session, and DOS has had the MODE command for choosing these things ever since it crawled out of its inventer's brain. But now we're in the modern, more secure world of NT-based Windows, the boot process is a new animal with very little of the power of DOS. Specifically, it seems, no MODE command, or equivalent. I've hunted the internet for such a thing all weekend: No joy.
Of course, there are many many web pages that tell you how to change the text mode during bootup for a Linux installation. Because of course Linux was created by the same people who have to use it and debug it on their own machines and who aren't straight-jacketed by a corporate mantra of "We're leaving DOS behind!", so they didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Anyone know how to make this happen for a Windows installation? I'd even consider using a Linux-oidal boot-loader that does the job before handingover to Windows, if I could be confident (a) it would work and (b) it wouldn'r render Windows un-maintainable. (I've had that happen before.)
Solutions applicable to either Win 2k or Win XP, and preferably both, would be very welcome. Ta. =:o}
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pbristow) wrote,
