dencorso

Great! When in doubt, this is the way to go! This kind of image (-z9 -ir) can be called a compressed "True Image" or "Dumb Image", or "Raw Image" (hence "ir" = image-mode: raw), because it makes no assumptions whasoever and, instead, just copies sector-by-sector. You can get it somewhat smaller, by zeroing-out the unused areas. And ghost can restore it to any HDD bigger or equal to the original one the image was acquired of. It's as near fool-proof as you can get and quite a good backup, but it's time-consuming.For saving and recovering the state of my system partitions, I usually do single partition images. Once you have the full true image backup optimized, do a partition backup of one of your system partitons, reformat that partition, sdelete -c that partition and restore that single partition image back to its place, and test to see whether everything is working OK. If so, that's the best way to create snapshots of a system being tuned or debugged. Repeat the test for your other system partitions and, all going well, start a library of backups for them. Before doing major experiments, always create a new image of the partition you're gonna mess with, so, no matter what you do, you remain less than 1h away from having it back as it was when you started (compared with full-disk operations, single partition operations are quite fast).

The good ol' way (DOS), though accessing USB through DOS is YOUR problem ):http://www.ranish.com/part/ That's exacltly how I do it: the Ranish Partition Manager (with v. 2.40 or 2.44 Beta!) in Win 98 SE with NUSB 3.3 providing the disk access. Works like a charm! I described it in more detail in this post. So long as you restrict yourself to partitioning and formating just the pen-drive, it's pretty safe. Now, if you mess with a fixed disk by mistake... Well, now you cannot say you were not warned.

jaclaz is right: DOSSTART.BAT is a way to do it. Alternatively, to be able to load a CD-ROM DOS device, from config.sys, and not get stuck with it always (you don't want to lose 32-bit access to the DVD drive by forcing Windows to always use a DOS real-mode driver, do you?), it's necessary to disable the automatic loading of Windows. If you do that (that is, set "BootGUI=0" in MSDOS.SYS), you'll now directly boot to the DOS prompt (and need to type "Win <Enter>" to get to Windows, this is really True DOS, after all). Of course, then you can use the menu facility in config.sys to create two alternate boots: one that goes to Windows (the default), and an alternative one that loads say, OAKCDROM.SYS (for an IDE ATAPI DVD Recorder) as a device and SHSUCDX.EXE from an install directive, both in config.sys (of course, there are more possible variations to this procedure than grains of sand in all beaches of the whole world...). This works, but is a lot of work. For once in a while use, a boot diskette is much easier.

Four relevant pointers (to Vista and, AFAIK, to Win 7, too): 1)How to install Windows Vista on a Fat32 partition (it actually begins on post #1713, but I think it's only fair to point to the post above, from when Dietmar first found out how to do it!). BTW, <STRG> <ALT> <DEL> means <CTRL> <ALT> <DEL>, of course. 2)Vista's New Partitioning Rules (there is much more interesting material in this site). 3)The case of the disappearing partitions 4)Partitions lost when working with more than one OS!!!

Use the source, Luke! ...er, Multibooter. As jaclaz said, in that context "cleanse" means overwrite every byte with 0x00 (pass one), then 0xFF (pass two), then any random byte (pass three), according to Sdel.c, while zero means overwrite every byte with 0x00 and stop there. When ZeroFreeSpace = TRUE, the overwriting routine stops at pass one. That's what's coded.

No! sdelete -z is really slow and won't help because it overwrites the sectors 3 times with random characters (DOD 5220.22-M standard)! I recommended sdelete -c, which overwrites the sectors with zeroes just once. Not only this is much faster, but it compresses better. Random characters, because of not having any pattern, however, don't. Sorry, I should have stated this more clearly! In any case, when in doubt, type just sdelete at the command prompt to see the brief help screen and remember which switch is for zeroing-out. I always do that, just in case, before I begin. For the full documentation see the sysinternals sdelete page. Later edit: For what's worth, the usual secure deletion methods are: DOD 5220.22-M = overwrite the sectors 3 times with random extended characters, then delete; DOD 5200.28-STD = overwrite the sectors 7 times with random extended characters, then delete; Zero-Out = overwrite the sectors once with only zeroes, then delete.

Yep, that's what I meant. You all ought to heed jaclaz, he sure knows what he's talking about. SHSUCDX does understand Joliet and accepts non-standard things like lowercase letters in CDFS. I've switched to SHSUCDX a long time ago (from v. 1.4b, of 2000, by John H. McCoy... by now, I use v. 3.03E, of 2009, by Jack R. Ellis), and never since did use MSCDEX anymore.

Bienvenido al MSFN! Todo un Forum aca' es dedicado a Win 9x/ME... Uno ha que leerlo lungamente, para responder a sus questiones, pero algunas son materia de opinion: se yo no creyera seguro a Win 98SE, no lo usaria... pero esta es mi opinion. Por otro lado, uno ha que postar en ingles aca', segundo las Reglas (link), aunque yo no lo haya hecho, por cortesia, en el presente mensaje. Hasta pronto!

Mine says: "Connects to other computers, networks, and the internet", and maps to {7007ACC7-3202-11D1-AAD2-00805FC1270E}.

SHSUCDX is the best idea. But it's just the installable CDFS driver. So you'll also need to previously load a driver for the hardware itself, and it depends on whether you have an IDE (=PATA), SATA, USB or FireWire connected drive. You'll find most of them collected here and here. That's all you need for CDFS-formatted optical media. Now, if the DVD is formatted as UDF, I'm not sure you can read it from DOS. I think SHSUCDX does not implement UDF, but I may be wrong here. Check its readme.text and version history for it. Good luck!

sysinternals sdelete. v.1.5 and later have the "-c" option to zero out the free space (= fill it with zeroes). Zeroed sectors are the best for compression, and you get rid of most of the trash. Only the trash in the file slacks will remain. I still didn't find any app capable of reliably getting rid of that. But cleaning the file slacks is a risky busines, because it can damage useful code or data, if gone wrong. I suggest you "sdelete -c" each partition first and then ghost the whole disk with "-z9 -ir". Then again, searching for a reliable freeware capable of doing a blind, full-disk, sector-by-sector copy may be worth it.

And that's where things went wrong... But even "-id" is simply not enough, if you want to be 100% sure. If you already knew System Commander creates unusual structures, you should have used "-z9 -ir" for, in the raw mode ghost makes no assumptions whatsoever and copies everything sector-by-sector. This is as guaranteed to work, when you put it back, as it can get. Then again, in this case, there would be no point in wiping the disk because, as you put the image back, all the trash (such as the contents of file slack and non-partition unused areas) will get back in, too. You can't both have your cake and eat it, you know.

Go to Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Local Security Settings --> Security Options -- Accounts: Rename Administrator Account Many other intersting things can be done from Control Panel --> Administrative Tools... Do explore it well. Did you at least save a full backup of your 2k installation, in case you decide to go for a triple-boot in the future?

Well, then, here are specific intructions, tailored to your case. Follow them to the letter, and all ought to go well. 00) Search for "Acrobat.exe" and find the folder it's in. Let's call it "Acrobat Folder". 0) Confirm that you do have Adobe Reader v. 6.0.6: go to the Acrobat Folder folder, right-click on Acrobat.exe, choose Properties, then Version and confirm that it says "File Version: 6.0.6.2007010800" (without the inverted double commas), in the "Other version information" box. If it does not, update your version all the way up to 6.0.6; 1) Download the freeware command-line utils.zip (attached to the bottom of this post), from KanastaCorp, grab inside it just patch.exe and drop it into the C:\windows\command\ folder; 2) Download the acrofull.zip attached to post #1, grab inside it acrofull.pat and drop it into the Acrobat Folder; 3) Still in the Acrobat Folder, right-click on Acrobat.exe, choose Properties, uncheck the read-only attribute, click Apply and Close, change the .exe extension to .ori, go to Properties again and check once again the the read-only attribute, click Apply and Close; 4) Start a DOS box, go to Acrobat Folder folder, and run the following command from the DOS prompt: patch -p Acrobat.ori acrofull.pat Acrobat.exe 5) Still in the Acrobat Folder, right-click on newly created Acrobat.exe, choose Properties, and set the read-only attribute. 6) Enjoy your nagless Reader! Good luck! NB: The patcher in post #21 does not apply to your case it's for Acrobat Reader, not Full or Pro. utils.zip

Welcome to MSFN! I'm sure you'll find many interesting things here. And Happy New Year for you and yours, too!

Hmm, I thought docx files were good. can you tell me where/what threads I can find that docx files is bad. Sorry, I've got no links about it to point you to. Of course, it's a matter of POV. From my perspective, when you save your documents as a Word 97/2k3 .doc (since that's, by now, the de-facto standard), you are assured just about anyone in the world will be able to open it easily. If you do it in .docx, you're contributing to force people to upgrade or to go out of their way in order to convert it, before they can read it. Moreover, you'll say to me: "but .docxs are more convenient to send by e-mail, in that they are compressed". True. But then you can easily zip a .doc, so is the trade over in compatibility worth it? In my opinion it's not. When I want just about everybody to be able to read it, I send a huge document as a zipped .doc, maybe even a multipart .zip containing my .doc. And when I know for sure my correspondent is somewhat more savvy, I send a 7z-ed .doc, for better compression. But I only send a .docx, under protest, when my correspondent explicitly requires such a file format, to the exclusion of all others (in theory, since that never happened to me, up to now). So, here you have my POV. I bet you can find others that agree with me, if you do search for it. As there also must be many that don't. This is clearly a case where YMMV.

Enter the BIOS, change nothing, but do take a look at which boot options it gives you. In case you find a USB-FDD option, you've hit jackpot!

It's a lot of trouble, but may be worth to try: move the disk to a single-core machine. Install XP. Do not activate. Install Tiny. Verify it works as intended. Move the disk to the dual-core: windows will detect it and update the hal and ntoskernel automagically (if the machines are either both intel or both amd... with one of each it's still possible but much more painful to do, because it's not really automagic anymore). A reboot is required. If you're very luck, it may work ok after that. If so, then you can activate. Good luck and Happy New Year!

Vanilla Sky - Umbrella

Welcome! Glad to have you here! Happy New Year!

Welcome to MSFN! You found the right place, I'm sure you'll have a great time here! Happy New Year!

Welcome to MSFN! And have a great New Year, too!

The problem is this does not work in Win98 to open and SAVE docx file.. Well, it's not at all clear to me it doesn't work to open .docx in 98... I think some more testing is needed. It seems it really desn't work to SAVE .docx files in 98. But why on earth would anyone wish to do that? You have to be able to open them. Then go ahead and save it as .doc, and help rid the world of those nasty .docxs!

Dave, IMO XP Pro SP3 is the way to go. That said, were I you, I'd triple boot. Add a second HDD. Set it to slave. Transfer an image of your present 2k installation to it. Adjust the setup to the fact that the new HDD has no 98. Remove your current HDD. Set the new one to master. Test you 2k in the new HDD Do an upgrad install of XP and see how that goes. Supposing all goes well you've now got a working XP. Add your current HDD back, but set to slave. Now you can select which HDD will be booted using the BIOS "Boot" menu. If you set to boot from the current, you have 2k and 98. If from the new one, you have XP. If all goes well up to this point, then its easy to create a multiboot system using Grub4DOS, instead of BIOS, to the same effect, so as to avoid needing to get into BIOS each time you need to invert the boot HDD. That's my two cents. Do think about it.

Welcome to MSFN! And have a great New Year, too!