McTavish

The 2k3 ntldr will be backwards comptible with XP for sure, but I'm just going to test it so give me half an hour. When you installed 2k3 was the XP partition still the ACTIVE partition on the hard drive. If not that will be why 2k3 did not set up the ntldr as your bootmanager. The dual boot will only be configured if the active partition is different to the one you are installing Windows to. Personally I never use the Microsoft bootmanager, causes more problems than it's worth. Have a read of this till I get back to you. http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/principles.htm

There is four 160gig drives there. 18 bootable OSes per drive is a limitation of my bootmanager. There have been a few people in this thread saying they can’t run Windows independently from logical partitions. It’s true you can’t install to a logical without using the Windows bootmanager, but you can clone an install there and so free up the primaries, then use another boot manager. If you use a compatible cloning tool and bootmanager then all you have to do with NT is edit the boot.ini in the clone to point to the correct partition number, (normal cloning precautions apply with NT if the parent is going to be present on the system during first boot of the clone). With Win9x there is no boot.ini so they boot fine as is. You just need your bootmanager to hide the partitions before it. You can do the required partition tweaks manually if need be. http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/ptedit.htm

Are you saying you had to add the 2k3 line to the boot.ini yourself? If so then your 2k3 install is not seeing XP during setup. Try replacing the XP ntldr file with the 2k3 one. I know that the Win2000 ntldr won’t work with XP, so perhaps the XP one won’t work with 2k3. You don’t need both these switches in your XP line. noexecute=optin noexecute=alwaysoff Remove the one you don’t want.

While in Vista, either - Control Panel>System>Advanced Settings>Advanced>Startup and Recovery, or with msconfig>Boot, or you can do it with VistaBootPro or EasyBCD. http://www.vistabootpro.org http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

If you mean on one machine then I might have had close to 40 not long ago when I had various betas of Vista and most versions or each as well – Home, Ultimate, Business, BusinessN etc. At the moment that machine must have around 20 different OSes. But if you’re counting clones as well then it usually has up to 70 fully independent OSes all on their own partitions with just one boot manager. And several in VMware. It’s just a standard 3-4 year old x86 PC. Screenshot

After discovering santa wasn’t real then xmas lost its point. Where I live it’s mostly considered as just the build up to hogmanay and a chance to get your liver warmed up and ready for the big event.

I never have to because I don't use one of my Windows clones for more than a few weeks.

That's funny! Thanks Mike, I was in need of a good giggle.

Handy little app Esquire, I do it with XPlite but it’s nice to know of a free tool for the job. Sorry I can’t help GoldenCat other than suggest a repair install. You should consider learning how to make and restore an image of your OS so you can restore without reinstalling. There is an excellent free imager available at the moment which probably won’t be free forever. Get it while you can. It comes included on the UBCD4Win, which is almost a must have anyway.

The page file is never included in images of an OS, so no need to move it for that reason. If it gets in the way when defragging just turn it off (as long as you have at least 512megs of ram) during defrag and then back on when finished. It usually then positions itself in one block just a bit after the other files. Don’t really know the answer to your last question, but I would imagine you would loose a bit on the slower drive but gain a bit from it being on that another drive. So perhaps no advantage either way. Edit: Better add a warning for any 2K users reading this - never turn off your pagefile.

In a command prompt window - ipconfig /all

Still can’t understand how that could work, a website must have a real address to forward its data packets to. If you give it a fake one, you don’t get the web page. If you have a dynamic IP address – even one that only changes rarely – then all that can be discovered from your IP is who your ISP is. If anyone wanted to find out more from this they would have to contact your ISP and ask them. If they are not a law enforcement agency then they will be told nothing. So unless you are breaking the law then you have nothing to worry about websites seeing your IP. It’s the information that your own computer gives out that can be used to identify and profile you. Requests can be sent back to your IP address asking the computer there to identify itself. Active content in the webpages can lift details about you from your machine and send it out. As long as your machine is locked down then just an IP address means nothing. Even using an anonymous proxy is pointless if your computer is betraying you. This site uses a small script in it’s web page to read your true IP off your system and send it back as part of a browser GET header.

It’s generic in the sense that it will work on any install of the OS version or earlier than it came from. It’s the boot.ini file that is more computer specific. The XP ntldr will work for any XP and 2K, where as the 2K one won’t work for XP. I don’t know about 2003, but it’s almost certainly ok for also XP and 2K. Never tested if the XP one will work for 2003.

I can’t see how the Unix/Linux thing could work other than for individual computers in a network. The last computer out of a network can’t hide its IP. Don’t know of a way other than with anonymous proxies, but even then you have to make sure your own computer is also not sending it out in the browser headers. You have to kill active content or filter your headers. You could spoof a Forwarded header in your requests so that it looks like your real address is a proxy and the spoof is your address. But if it’s just for privacy reasons while browsing, you’d be better locking down what leaves your own computer rather than worrying about your IP.

Has anyone ever come across a hacked ntldr that does not need a boot.ini file? I know if you remove boot.ini then ntldr will just default to booting C:\Windows\, but this only works for primary partitions on the boot hard drive. It's like it checks for the active partition on the boot drive and then goes for that one. (EDIT: Just been trying that again and it’s not the active partition is goes for but the the first Windows folder it finds from the start of the boot drive – even if that partition is hidden). I want ntldr just to go straight to C:\Windows\ on the partition it finds itself on - whether that is a logical partition or another hard drive. Basically I want to remove the step of having to alter the boot.ini after cloning. Hacking ntldr myself would be beyond me I'm sure, but does anyone know if such a thing would be possible? Thanks folks.

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-73586283-839522115-854245398-1004\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings DisableCachingOfSSLPages

If there is nothing you want to keep then yes you can just delete all the files you see or format the partition or delete the partition and start again. Probably best to at least format it so you know everything is gone. You can do partitioning or formatting from Disk Management in XP. http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_management.htm

Yes just go ahead and reinstall XP on your C: drive, but make sure you do it by booting the computer from the XP CD and during setup delete the XP partition and then point the install to the free space. This will remove every part of the old install. Then once XP is up and running you can do what ever you like to D. http://www.windowsxphome.windowsreinstall....ldhdd/index.htm Unless when you say reinstall XP you mean a repair install that will keep your current programs and settings.

Sounds like a classic hardware fault. First remove and refit the ribbon cable, if no improvement then replace it. If still giving trouble download the manufacture’s diagnostic utility and fully test the drive. It’s most likely the hard drive, but could of course be anything to do with the drive, including the motherboard controller. http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1 http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDr...ities/hutil.htm

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/ot...board/win2k.htm Knew I had a link on this somewhere. Is any of your 2K partition over the 137gig mark? I don't know but it may be that a repair install won't be happy if it is. If you could resize the partition down under 137gigs with Partition Magic or the like. Or clone it to a smaller hard drive.

I would normally suggest a repair install but if your 2K partition is over the first 137gigs of the drive, I’m not sure this will work, even with SP3 or higher on the 2K CD. Perhaps it will because your install will already have the 48bit LBA fix done. I’ve had success more than once with a repair install on 2K and it should keep most of your programs and settings. Your 2K CD will need the same service pack as is in the OS. You can prepare Windows before you make the change to new hardware, but don’t know if you can do it now. Perhaps by remote editing the registry or if there is a way to use sysprep now? Someone else might know.

Thanks Chee and ALYum for your answers to my slightly off topic question. The little project I was working on has been put on hold for now but I’m sure your information will be useful when I get back to it. McTavish

I've used RegEditPE from a BartPE boot CD to access the reg on non booting hard drives. If the old dive is too bad to work on, try making an image of the OS onto a good drive. Alternatively, if the individual hives you have recovered are not corrupted you could try swapping them with the hives in a good OS on a good hard drive. The UBCDforWIN comes with RegEditPE already included.

Hello all, I came across this thread in my searches and it’s close to what I’m looking for, so I was wondering if anyone might be able to help. I’m looking for the file/s in Vista that are responsible for the small green animated progress bar on the first black screen, before final graphic bootscreen appears. I would also like to know what files in XP are responsible for its white progress bar. I’m assuming in Vista that this progress bar is loaded by winload.exe, but is it perhaps built into winload? Similarly with the XP one, is it a part of ntldr, or separate files? Thanks folks.