McTavish

A4Proxy can also do it, but there must be others. Don't know if it can be done without a third party app.

http://www.hsc.fr/ressources/breves/min_srv_res_win.en.html http://www.grc.com/freeware/dcom.htm

Natively I would say 8gig. You would need to go to the Compaq website and search for your exact model and see what the last bios update supported – then update yours if need be. It could be possible you could get up to 32gig. Perhaps an add in controller card or DDO (dynamic drive overly) could increase this. http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/...ve_barriers.htm

Oh I get it. Sorry, don't know of anything that can do that automatically, but I would not be surprised if there was such a thing somewhere.

Your browser, and anything that only has the host URL, already does just that. It’s called DNS resolving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~jphb/comms/dns.html Or are you saying you want to do it yourself? Unless your ISP’s service is giving you trouble then there’s not much to be gained. http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/what_is_hosts.html

If It's just for privacy reasons then hiding your IP address is not the way to go. See this thread. http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=88851&hl=

This is by a company that sells a proxy service, so maybe it is hyped a little bit, but everything in it is true. http://theproxyconnection.com/openproxy.html

Ponch….how do you rewrite the partition table? Does Ranish do it or have you to do it manually? Your heading for wiped hard drive kumarkumar if you don’t know 100% what you are doing.

Ok it's not doing it now, but i can assure you it used to, as I can record and view the outgoing headers in Proxomitron. I suppose I should have checked before I posted it. Perhaps they just stopped doing it that way, or perhaps IE has closed the door it was using. I've seen all sorts of things in the GET headers - including my email address. That was before I had a filter in place.

Well I've never done such a thing so don't know if there is any app around that can do it. MbrWiz will wipe the first sector or the first track, but that will be everything, including the partition table, so you don't want to try that. You would probably have to do it manually and use an editor to zero out each byte - being careful not to touch the PT or Disk Signature. This page on Starmans site will show you the MBR and what each part is. If you go to his free tools page there should be a sector editor somewhere there. http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm Really, it's not worth the effort.

The point about the large file size Jeremy is what is all that code doing? It can't be just the nice graphics. Similar tools with more features can be a quarter of that size or less. Ghost on a floppy is a 100 times smaller. Bloated software usually means badly written software. Anyone could have predicted that Acronis would get the most votes in a poll here. I bet most people haven't used anything else and have only went with Acronis because it has been the most well marketed in the last few years. Most of Acronis' favorable computer mag reviews were bought with free software for the magazine's cover CDs.

The MBR is on the very first sector of the first track of the hard drive and it is reserved for the bootcode and the partition table. There is no file system on the first track and you can’t merge it into a partition – as partitions would not exist on the drive without the partition table. You could zero out any bootcode that might be in there, but there is no point. It’s tiny anyway- only about 400bytes. An icon on your desktop could be 50 times larger.

Unless you've fixed Win98's 137gig limitation Mike, then don't let is use any part of the drive over that figure. It may seem to be fine, but you will get data corruption. It was no doubt a DDO you used - perhaps MaxBlast or EZ-Drive. Just be aware it is on your hard drive and of possible problems it could cause if you ever alter your configuration.

I’m not sure of the long term stability of using just part of the drive Drugwash. There is the option of getting an add-in controller card. The other thing is a Dynamic Drive Overlay (translation software in the MBR) that can compensate for your motherboard, but I would advise against this if you want to multiboot. Besides, if you want Win98 on there then you would need to fix its 137gig limitation so it could run without problems on a 160gig drive. I would say your best option would be to get a smaller hard drive. If you want to go ahead then probably best to use the Linux bootmanager. So, install Win98 first to a primary. Then 2003, also to a primary, making sure it does not set up the ntldr as a bootmanager by putting it inside Win98. Do this by making the 2003 partition the Active one on the hard drive before you start the install, (by booting the computer from the 2003 DVD). Then install Linux to any partition/s you like and during setup if you get a choice make sure it puts the bootmanager, probably Grub, to the MBR of the hard drive. That should setup the multiboot for you. You can’t make a logical partition the Active one on the hard drive, so if want to install 2003 to a logical you can only do it by allowing it to put the boot files on a separate primary, which will be inside your Win98 install, which will make the whole multiboot thing with Linux much more messy. Are you sure your 2003 will use a FAT partition? http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluati...ysreqs/2003.asp You can create a separate logical data partition in FAT that all the OSes can use.

I've not tried this myself. http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

Hi Drugwash, as it is a little off topic I would say probably best if you started your own new thread. It will get more attention that way as well. I’ll watch out for it.

If I get the time today or tomorrow I'll give Acronis V10 a try. Partition Manager is the best - period. You can't however create backup images with it, only clones. If you have a spare partition, primary or logical, on any drive, you could use a clone as your back up. Just clone it back to your main partition if need be. This is how I always do things myself and seldom bother with images any more. It's much quicker, takes about 2 mins for me to clone my XP install - although it is stripped down with no personal data in it. If you multiboot you can boot into the backup clone now and again and keep it updated. I in fact run nothing but clones of a clean and updated master install of Windows. A clone only lasts me a few weeks before I boot into the next one. Once I've trashed 4 or 5 I just set PM to make me 4 or 5 new clones while I put the kettle on. Edit: Holy Moly, just downloaded trial of v10. It's a 101mb! That's an Operating System in my book. Was going to give it a quick look but it needs to connect to register before it will install the trial. No way I'm putting it on anything other than a test machine, and I've got none net connected at the mo. I'll sort it later.

I assume you mean Acronis sonu27? It’s been a couple of versions since I played with Acronis and I do remember that it messed with things it should never be touching in my computer, but I can’t remember what it was. It was only on a test machine so I wasn’t really paying much attention to that side of things. I have however often seen Acronis listed as a running process in the HiJackThis logs of other people, so my guess would be yes, it runs all the time. I have not upgraded to PM8 yet, but it would be a worrying development indeed if it now wanted to install a service. Not usually how PM operates.

The first primary partition created on a drive will be marked as active. All it means is that this will be the partition the Master Boot Record on that hard drive will look on for an operating system if the computer tries to boot from that drive. As you don’t have an OS on that drive, and most likely not even any bootcode in the MBR, and it’s not the boot drive in the computer, then the active flag for that partition is meaningless and will never be needed or used or referenced by any software except for tools like partition magic when they examine the hard drive.

Wow, too complicated for my liking Wendy. Much simpler if you use a third party bootmanager. It works alright but I was never trying to maximise the hardware for each OS. Why do you say it won’t work awergh?

Question One: same answer as jaclaz, no difference in the slightest. Both are just sectors of the hard drive where data is stored. The only time you really need to give consideration whether to use a primary or logical would be for an OS, or if you were short on primaries. Is there a reason why you want to remove the Active flag from the partitions on your other drives? Again, it will make no difference to you what-so-ever if they are marked active or not.

Not true Grtz. The Windows bootmanager will allow installing to another drive to either a primary or logical partition.I can’t think what your problem might be Feroz. How are you installing, from within Windows or by booting directly from the 2k3 CD? Are you sure your drive configuration is correct and your XP is the boot drive in the bios. Is the second drive correctly set as Master/Slave and on the right cable plug. Are your drives IDE or SATA or both. What other drives are connected? Try removing any USB storage devices during the install. Personally I’d recommend making the drive the boot drive for the install and then use a different boot manager. This way your two Windows installs won’t be linked together. http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/principles.htm

Your top ten review link is to a site that rates software by how much the companies pay them. Either by ‘sponsor’ fees or commission on a sale. So it’s not an unbiased review and should in no way be taken as such. I can’t vouch for Genie, but Acronis is still the new kid on the block and while it is getting better, I still would not trust it with my data. Besides, it’s bloated and over priced for the feature set it offers. For an affordable home solution it’s either Ghost or Paragon I’ve used both for several years, but mostly now I go with Paragon for its ease of use and speed. They were awarded a Microsoft Gold Certificate a couple of yeas ago. I’ll eat my hat when Acronis gets one.

Rather than having 9 computers, it could be done on 3 with dual/multiboot setups. 95a/b/c and NT on one machine. 98/SE/ME/2000 on another. XP/2003/Vista on a third. This would still give you the best hardware for each system. It could probably be done on just one machine with a little compromising in the hardware stakes. Vista might be the one exception.

Yes, the XP ntldr WON’T boot 2k3, is just stalls on a black screen. I replaced ntldr in XP with the 2k3 one and both 2k3 and XP boot fine. If you are still cautious of trying it, then if you have a floppy drive in your machine you should make an XP boot floppy. This will let you boot XP even if the ntldr and boot.ini files are missing in your XP install. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305595/EN-US Or download this little .exe that will make one for you. The boot.ini on it has two options, the first and second partitions on the boot hard drive. If you replace the ntldr on it with the 2k3 one, then this floppy should boot both your XP and 2k3.