Vista's default boot manager looked a little bland, so I spiced it up
with a bit of colour and "graphics" (have a closer
look, if you skipped it before). How? The
display is generated by an XSLT transformation, stored in the
MUI file. Using
Resource Hacker, I
extracted the resource (BOOTMGR.XSL from
c:\boot\en-us\bootmgr.exe.mui), modified it and put it back. (My boot
drive is FAT; you may need to take ownership if using
NTFS -- see How-To
Geek for how to do that.) Here is my
BOOTMGR.XSL file, with all the
modifications taking place in the "osboot-list-tools" section, about
¾ through (search for "tools"). It's encoded as UTF-8;
you will need to save it as Unicode before replacing it (use "Save
As" in Notepad). The default header/footer/selection colour can be changed
by adding inverse-color="XXXXRGBX" to body; the
non-selected list colour can be changed by adding
normal-color="RGBX" to select.
Jason Hood.
29 August, 2007.
