Tux beats windows
Site Informations
SITE ADMINISTRATOR:
Gillen Daniel
VISITORS:
OPENGATES
opengates.jpg

Infos:
About OpenGates
OpenGates is a small tool written in C that will "open" the hardware limitation "gates" of Windows installations. All current Windows versions (up to and including Windows 7) are too stupid to boot after the hardware to which the root disk is connected to has changed. This happens for example if you try to boot a raw copy of a Windows installation in a virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMWare or if you try to use your old Windows installation on a new PC. You will certainly end up with a BSOD telling you Windows can't access his boot device (Error code 0x0000007B). It should be possible to solve this by recovering Windows using the original installation medium but as one does not always has it, I wrote OpenGates.

What does OpenGates do?
* Patch the registry in order to enable Micro$oft Windows's legacy IDE drivers.
* Blank user account passwords (In case you "forgot" them ;) ).
* Remove drivers that could conflict with the new hardware.
* Determine used HAL (Important when migrating to VirtualBox).
* Copy AntiWPA to disk (You have to activate it manually afterwards!).
* Print out useful infos to configure your VM.

All steps that change data on your disk are optional and you are given the chance to skip them.

How to use OpenGates?
The easiest way is to integrate OpenGates into a BartPE CD-Rom. Just grab the BartPE plugin below and read the included README for step-by-step instructions. Once you built the CD, just boot from it and let OpenGates do his work.

You can also attach your harddisk to another Windows installation and use the win32 package below, but this is far more complicated than booting with a BartPE CD.

Development status
I'm currently working on the following things:
 * Porting OpenGates to Linux in order to not need BartPE and a Windows license anymore

Virus alerts
As OpenGates contains AntiWPA, multiple AV scanners complain about the zip file containing a virus. These are all false positives! Please disable your AV before downloading the file and see the following analysis on virustotal.com for an overview of false alarms AV software could output.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/1e7eb45b04ada56c9def7c3d458cfdb196bc203198a3cc49b82f29ee316121ab/analysis/

In addition to the above, the use of AntiWPA or even the posession of it may be illegal in your country! If in doubt, please consider to not use this feature of OpenGates.

Bugs
Currently none are known but as OpenGates uses highly experimental and undocumented techniques and I can't test them with every possible software combination, you may encounter some.

If so, please take the time to report them to <bugs (at) pinguin (dot) lu>

License:
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Downloads:
Due to Google's crappy Safe Browsing, I had to encrypt the following ZIP files. The password for all 3 files is "V3vfVGszMu9u7LjJ".

Windows binary: opengates-0.2.1-win32.zip (SHA256: 17f2448b7001d6d8365a533593b62419af4001d39cfa98a26af4373923bd5591)
Plugin for BartPE: opengates-0.2.1-bartpe.zip (SHA256: c894ce3b75f395ec48235b1e0671c97f134e6ff0f8d3a781ca71077b59df154f)
Source: opengates-0.2.1-src.zip (SHA256: 1352ba1090ceace3b4a08d05d1fd49a87ea492e836ba9f6ebd7fa75353d95c30)
Docs: Readme, HOWTO-BootableOpenGatesCD.pdf