About recovery
It should go without saying that the process of backing up the original ntldr is extremely important.
As it is responsible for starting the process of booting Windows, if it gets messed-up, Windows won't start.
Therefore, you should prepare another way of booting into Windows before modifying the file, so that, if
necessary, you have a way of replacing the messed-up version with the backup. This could be another computer
that you can put the hard-drive with the modded bootloader into as a slave. Alternatively you could make a
PE (preinstalled environment). This is basically an extremely simple version of Windows that can be
installed to a USB stick. That way, if the need arises, you can edit your BIOS settings and set the USB stick
to be the first drive to attempt to boot from. Once the PE has loaded, you can rename/delete the messed-up
ntldr file and rename the original back to "ntldr" (checking its attributes after doing so). You can
find information on PEs with a Google search, and there is free software such as BartPE to create a PE on a USB stick using your Windows setup CD.
Summary
- Replace existing bytes as opposed to inserting your own.
- If a message ends in h0D h0A, then make sure yours does, too.
- Messages end with a h00 byte. Do not replace any h00 bytes.
- If a message includes a placeholder (e.g. "%d"), then include it in your own message, too.
- Ensure that the modified file is 250,048 bytes long, read-only, hidden and not compressed.
- Keep a backup of the original ntldr and have a recovery plan ready.
- Robbi-985 aka SomethingUnreal