Andrew Huang's Blog, page 7

Bypassing Windows 11 Account Setup

I had the misfortune of setting up a Windows 11 machine and being confronted with creating a mandatory Microsoft account. I can’t concisely explain why being forced to create an account bothers me so much, but generally when a vendor tries this hard to get you to do something, it’s not for a user-friendly reason.

Anyways, after a bit of searching I found that Rufus is able to create a Windows 11 boot image that can bypass the account setup requirement; but for various reasons I just wanted to modify the OEM configuration.

After poking through the Rufus source code for a bit, I found the pointy end of the stick, applied the patch, and it worked.

Here’s my notes on how I did it — mostly so I have it someplace where I won’t lose it, but also maybe because someone else might find it useful. NB: Microsoft seems to have been paying attention and hardening their setup process against work-arounds to account setup, so the shelf life of this post might not be so long.

Assuming you have a brand new machine with a Windows 11 OEM pre-install, and you have not yet turned it on:

On first boot, go to BIOS settings and turn off the TPM (and backdoors like Intel AMT, Absolute Persistence module, etc.), and allow third party OS boot. On my machine (a Lenovo laptop) this caused the screen to go black for quite a while on reboot as it undid the Bitlocker encryption on the pre-installed Windows volume. Decrypting the Windows volume is necessary for the next steps.Grab an Ubuntu install image, put it on a USB drive, and boot the Ubuntu image using the “Try Ubuntu” selection.Mount the C: volume (probably the biggest partition on the NVME drive). You may have to run ntfsfix on the volume first to make it writeable.Edit the file at …/Windows/panther/unattend.xml and insert some XML (exact incantation shown below).Unmount the volume and reboot.When the first dialog box appears during setup, hit Shift + F10 and type OOBE\BYPASSNRO into the command prompt shell that appears. This will disable the internet connection requirement, and force a reboot of the machine to restart the setup process.When you get to “Let’s connect you to a network” there should be an option now that says “I don’t have Internet”; click that, and the system should proceed to setup a local-only account.

During setup, I connected to the Internet using a wired Ethernet line, so I could easily cut the internet by pulling the cable out if things went wrong and I had to try again (if you do set up by wifi, it’s a bit more complicated to cut internet). In my trials I did end up connecting a couple times and allowing the system to update, and that didn’t impact my ability to pull off the procedure in the end.

The specific commands I used within Ubuntu to access the unattended installer manifest were:

sudo suntfsfix /dev/nvme0n1p3mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mntnano /mnt/Windows/panther/unattend.xml

But the exact path to the Windows partition will probably be different depending on your OEM and hardware configuration. The right partition is probably the biggest partition, so you can use fdisk to inspect your disk and guess the exact path for your machine.

The XML I injected was this snippet:

1reg add HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Stick it in the first “settings” block, just after the “component” block. So overall, the top of the unattended.xml file on my machine ends up looking like this:

Lenovo c:\windows\system32\oemlogo.bmp Lenovo true https://www.lenovo.com/recycling https://www.lenovo.com/trade-in-program 1 reg add HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f .... more settings blocks below ....

It’s not exactly a fast or convenient procedure, but unfortunately the “just unplug network during setup” hack that populates the front couple pages of Google searches on the topic was patched. Anyways, I always disable a bunch of the security theater/DRM and back doors installed by OEMs (in addition to running an overnight RAM test, hence the need to allow third-party/unsigned OS boot), so this was only incrementally more effort on top of what I was already going to do.

Name that Ware, September 2023

The Ware for September 2023 is shown below.

Thanks to FETguy for contributing this ware!

Winner, Name that Ware August 2023

The Ware for August 2023 is a viewfinder from a JVC Super VHS Camcorder, model number GR-SXM915U. I’ll give the prize to Jin because of the correct identification of the SOIC as the BA7149F. Congrats, email me for your prize! The exact model number of the originating camera should be harder to pin down, because a similar viewfinder was probably used across several models for some years.

The viewfinder featured as this Ware has found a new life as part of a pretty neat project by the Ware’s contributor, Adrian: it displays a composite IR + visible light image, which is generated by glitching a live analog video stream from a visible light camera with an analog signal derived from a Pi Pico using an R2R DAC (i.e., the Pi Pico generates an analog signal almost directly off its digital GPIO via a resistor network — no DAC chip required). The Pico reads the H/V sync pulses encoded within the analog video stream, and overlays the digital readout of a 2D IR sensor by injecting well-timed pulses into the analog video signal (if I’m understanding the project correctly). More details and video at Adrian’s Mastodon post!

Name that Ware, August 2023

The Ware for August 2023 is shown below.

Thanks to adrian for sharing this ware! Adrian sent me several wonderful photos, and the whole thing is actually pretty neat to look at. However, for better or for worse the parts in the ware are so unique that most of them resolve to an answer with a simple search query – even those of the most humble looking 16-pin SOICs. Hopefully this partial view of the ware makes it at least a little bit of a challenge to guess.

Winner, Name that Wäre July 2023

The Ware for July 2023 is a “KUP 10” by aditec. Also, thanks to FETguy, we now have a schematic of the ware:

The spirit of Name that Ware is about demystifying electronics and encouraging people to learn by taking things apart. Drawing a schematic from an image of a circuit board is a great example of this, so FETguy gets the prize this month. Congrats, email me for your prize!

Name that Wäre, July 2023

The “wäre” for July 2023 is shown below.

Thanks to zebonaut for submitting this ware. According to him, this was fished out of a dumpster in Germany, hence “wäre” (and yes, it’s a nonsense word, but I also think it’s cute). We had a little chuckle over the ware’s construction (or more precisely, the lack thereof). You could say, “they don’t build them like they used to” — could something like this pass certification in modern Germany? Well, it seemed to have at least passed the test of time, since it only recently found its way into a dumpster, and the rating label indicates a manufacturing date from the 14th week of 1996.

Winner, Name that Ware June 2023

The Ware for June 2023 is a Sony TR-733 “7-transistor radio” from the mid 1960’s. I’ll give the prize to Pedro Rodrigues, because even though the model number isn’t correct, as far as I can tell the portion of the electronics shown is identical between the TR-729 and the TR-733. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The main differences between the two models seem to be cosmetic; the TR-733 has a round speaker grill and a blue plastic case, whereas the TR-729 has a rectangular grill and a white plastic case. I’m not sure what the story is behind introducing a model revision with such subtle differences, but I suppose it’s probably either linked to some sort of market differentiation (e.g. regional or price discrimination), and/or a cost-down or engineering fix to improve a design issue.

It’s funny to think that around 60 years ago, we could count the number of transistors in a flagship product on our fingers. Now our handheld gadgets have … about 10 orders of magnitude more transistors in them (an Apple A14 has 11.8 billion transistors and that’s just the CPU; the ~100’s GiB of FLASH memory also counts as transistors).

Name that Ware, June 2023

The ware for June 2023 is shown below.

This ware should be possible to match to an exact model number, based on this photo alone — if not simply because in its era there were fewer consumer electronics devices to choose from.

I tested the image against Google Image search and this particular crop of the ware seems to foil any exact matches. However, if you do manage to find an exact hit with a simple image search engine query, I’d be curious to know what you’re using, so I can use this to test against future wares.

According to the original owner, this ware cost almost a month’s wages back when it was purchased!

Winner, Name that Ware May 2023

Last month’s ware is the Automatic AUT-450C “Connected Car Assistant” (OBD-II code scanner and GPS tracker with cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity). The company went out of business shortly after the start of the pandemic.

Here’s some more views of the ware — I had left out some boards and views that made it a bit more challenging to identify, perhaps a bit too challenging.

The hole cut-out that many assumed was a camera was actually a supercap — it is rated for 3.0V at 1F. Based on its direct connection to a switching regulator I’m guessing it’s there to coordinate safe shut-down of the SoC, and not for RTC maintenance.

It’s a bit tough to pick a winner this month. Both Cody and Adrian shared detailed explanations, but I think overall Adrian might have gotten closest first, with a link to a fleet tracking device. I think the device is pretty close to what you’d have in a fleet tracker, but with a B2C business model instead of a B2B business model. Congrats Adrian, email me for your prize!

Name that Ware, May 2023

The Ware for May 2023 is shown below.

This is yet another fine ware contributed by jackw01. I suspect this one may be guessed quite quickly, but I’ll leave one hint anyways: there is more than one board in this assembly.