Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.2.3790.0) build guide

Warning

This is not my work, it is a compilation of resources from 4chan /g/ board and its various archives. All the hard work was done by the anons!

What source code leaked?

On 23rd September 2020 a ~2.9GB nt5src.7z file was posted to 4chan’s /g/ board, containing leaked partial (~70% complete) source code for Windows XP SP1 & Server 2003.

This code has apparently been going around in private circles for several years, but was mostly unknown to the wider internet until this recent leak.

The archive contains a majority of the code needed for a full Windows XP/Server2003 install, minus any activation/cryptographic or third-party code.

Filename: nt5src.7z
Size: 3,149,677,191 bytes

MD5: 94DEA413D439DDA8ABCAC83CFE799FC7
SHA-1: 350B2617D3095517A8D1981062C9D88A48B5D1A2
SHA-256: 2BB3609FA4C2B2641F43AEF751A84DB5820B64748B7D2D0891D1CB1E55268CE9

If you want to find a clean, original copy of the leak, just search for “nt5src.7z notrepacked” on your favorite search engine, the legit torrent magnet starts with magnet:?xt=urn:btih:1a4e5...

Can we build a working OS from the code?

Yes! Many anons have built their own versions of Server2003, and XP-on-2003-kernel. Users on /g/ were actually the first to publicly show a working build made from the code (installing & booting successfully) less than a week after the leak showed up!

Unfortunately the process requires some files that don’t have source included though, but these are all linked in the build guide below.

It’s also worth pointing out that while the leak contained two different source trees (XPSP1 build 2600.1106 + Server2003 build 3790), we’ve only managed to get a Server2003 build completely working so far, which is why this guide focuses more on Server2003 than XP.

This is probably a good thing anyway as the Server2003 code is almost a year newer than XPSP1 (though it’d still be nice if XPSP1 could be made to work eventually…)

What about 64-bit? Can I build x64 editions?

64-bit support is kinda here, the leak has code for both IA64 & AMD64 processors, but while XP/Server2003 both released with IA64 versions from day one, AMD64 support was only added many years later with XP x64 & Server2003 SP1 (in other words, many years after this source code…)

IA64 support will probably work fine since the XP/Server2003 from the time of this source code had support for it (though afaik it hasn’t actually been tried yet), but seems AMD64 was still in development at the time.

The v10 release of this guide improves support for making AMD64 builds, and some anons have even some success getting AMD64 builds to start booting, but unfortunately problems with Wow64 & possibly other things are preventing it from starting properly atm. (see amd64 build support section for more info)

What’s needed to build? Do I need Visual Studio?

Fortunately the complete build toolchain was included in the leak, all that’s required is a Windows build machine running XP or later.

Visual Studio isn’t needed, and currently there aren’t any VS solution files/projects for interacting with the code, would be really nice to have them though.

Will this help get XP tools/kernel running on *nix?

Unlikely since the tools are coded to work in a completely different environment, maybe if someone wanted to put in the months of work to port it over, but it’s far from being code you can just copy-paste into *nix and then build.

Is this code going to help ReactOS/WINE in any way?

No, those projects would never want to make use of such stolen/illegal code (ReactOS even performed their own year-long code audit when it was claimed that they used an older leaked codebase!).

Even hinting that you have knowledge of Windows internals learned through code like this is enough to disqualify you from contributing to them (on that note, if you ever want to work on ReactOS/WINE in the future you should probably quit looking into this source code while you still can!)

Did this leak come from the passworded RAR I heard about?

No, the passworded RAR was a completely different thing which turned out to be fake.

Before the real leak came about some anons on /g/ were trying to organise a source code collection for various OS’s, with that collection also containing a passworded windows_xp_source.rar file that was dug up after years of being unseeded (posted in ~2007), which some anons spent several weeks trying to crack.

Sometime after the nt5src file leaked the password for that RAR was eventually found, being internaldev, which revealed that the RAR was nothing but a fake archive that made use of similar directory structures to the older NT4 leak.

Unfortunately the weeks of posts about the lost-then-found RAR file being followed by an actual source code leak led many anons to confuse the two things as being the same, so just to emphasise: the passworded-rar has nothing to do with the recent leak!.

What’s the deal with this NOTREPACKED/repackfag guy?

The confusion around the leaks was made even worse thanks to some idiot almost immediately deciding to repack the original nt5src.7z leak with different compression - using the exact same filename for his repacked version - and then making the first torrent of the leak contain that repack instead of the original, pretty much fragmenting the leak & attempting to erase the history behind it, all just to save a few hundred MB. Luckily it didn’t take long for NOTREPACKED-chad to come through with a proper torrent of the non-repacked files that were originally gifted to us by leaker-anon, which has been linked in the threads ever since.

The repackfag will usually come along to the thread every now and then to stir things up & spam schizo-tier narratives, likely in some attempt at convincing any tourists that might be visiting (which is pretty sad when 90% of the time the thread has the exact same people inside it who have long tired of his act). It’s safe to say this guy has no interest in actually contributing and just wants to bring down the threads (odd considering this guy spent weeks making begging threads for the XP code…)

Anyway if you need to check what version of the leak you have, refer to the hashes of the original nt5src.7z above.

File Hashes

SHA-256 hashes of the files used by this guide:

author

created May 5, 2022

words 1146

tags #windows, #source, #4chan