Noise

You cant copy anything to the netlogon folder during logon, windows will delete next time replication takes place. It's not a normal share.

You "might" be able yo get a DOS boot disk to initialize the USB bus on your motherboard. And you "might" be able to find a DOS mode driver that would allow you to mount the USB Drive as a drive letter under DOS. But once DOS is loaded and running, it's not really possible to load a bootsector (either an image file or bootable drive) and boot from it. At least I've never seen this done, it may be possible. But if it is, there's some black magic involved.

I found that disabling the indexing service sometimes will break the Search function in Explorer. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Search won't give an error, it just won't find any files. Weird.

I get the same thing ocassionally. There's probably a registry setting to disable this - but I'll be damned if i can find it. I also get this warning when trying to run vbs scripts and executables from network drives.

The easiest way to fix this is to enable the guest account on both PC's. Start/Run: lusrmgr.msc Go into the Users section and double-click the Guest account. Uncheck the box that says "Account is disabled". Ckick the OK button to confirm. That's it, you should be able to access each others shares just fine now. Hopwever, you do open up some security holes by enabling the Guest account. But you should be safe behind the linksys router.

Ignore it if you want. It probably won't be an issue to you personally in the long run. As far as NT4 goes, I was telling a story of how I came upon this issue. This applies to XP and 2K3 also. But the fact is you'll be using shortcuts that contain invalid data in them. If you do things like this in an enterprise environment you will have problems. Shortcuts should be created on the system in which they'll be used, period. <edited out because it was mean>

maxXPsoft, You're not understanding the issue here. And that's understandable, because very few people really know whats going on with shortcut (.lnk) files. Try this: 1. Manually create a link to notepad on your desktop. 2. Copy that .lnk file to another computer. 3. Double-click the copied link. 4. Note the delay before notepad actually starts. 5. Now go into Start/Programs and double-click the regular notepad link. Notice the difference? If you don't, you probably have link-tracking disabled in the registry (good thing to do btw). I'm talking about regular everyday shortcuts here. Shortcut files remember the name of the PC they were created on. The issue I'm talking about here has nothing to do with NTFS. When you run them on another computer, Windows will "sometimes" try to access the originating PC over the network. To really see this you need 2 PC's with different names on separate networks. The delay can sometimes be quite pronounced, In NT4 I've seen it take minutes to timeout and then finally try and access the program on the local PC. In my first sysadmin job (a long long time ago) this was a huge problem. I built all the PC's with .lnk files I developed on a test machine. We constantly had performance problems when people tried to start their applications. We also noticed a lot of undue network activity during these delays. It was a well learned lesson when we finally figured out what was going on. When we scripted the creation of these shortcuts (using shortcut.exe instead of copying them, the problem disappeared. The registry fix is explained here.

THIS = BAD! BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD !!! You are copying shortcut files (.lnk) from one machine (your development machine) to another machine (the PC you're building).

When will you people learn, it is extremely bad form to use shortcuts created on one machine on another machine. Shortcuts remember the machine they were created on and, by default, they will try to connect to that machine first when you double-click them. This will introduce un-needed delays and network activity. You can make the shortcuts "stupid" before you copy them using the shortcut.exe ms utility. Or you can turn off "link tracking" in windows. Better yet, don't do it - it's amateurish! Always install re-create the shortcuts using a script or utility.

I think the minimum VLP is 3 licenses.

Thanks egrath... I could have sworn I tried that! /No more late-night script writing for me!

Martin, I believe I understand about how you like to structure your filing system. It is a sound approach. Let me put it another way... 1. Is your "Lite-SMS" going to be used to deploy software to desktops already in use? 2. Or, is it going to be used ONLY during the automated-build process. While Windows is auto-logging on under the Local Administrator account. 3. If #1 = true, how do you plan on handling users that DONT have administrator rights? How are you planning on initiating the software installations?

Maybe someone around here can help me, this is driving me crazy. I have a text file as follows test.txt blahblahblah >< ewrfewtr (minutes "0") blahblahblah >< ewrfewtr (minutes "5") blahblahblah >< ewrfewtr (minutes "00") I need to find all lines with (minutes "0") or (minutes "00"). So, I need to use the find command to search for the string minutes "0 and the double-quote is driving me crazy. The following doesnt work in a cmd file: find "minutes "0" "test.txt" find "minutes /"0" "test.txt" find "minutes ^"0" "test.txt" find "minutes %"0" "test.txt" find "minutes %%"0" "test.txt" Notice how I try to "escape" the quote in the string. Nothing I've tried seems to work. Anyone have any ideas?

Just Curious Martin, Is your "Lite-SMS" going to take into account users without Admin Rights?

Sound like the system isn't getting the hard disk parameters correct. Sometimes weird stuff like this happens when people load special boot sectors on their hard disks. These special boot sectors are usually installed so motherboards with old BIOS's can use all the data on large hard disks. The first thing I would do is delete the MBR on all the hard disks in the system. Then nuke all partitions so you have a clean slate. Then install your OS from scratch. the easiest way I've found to nuke the MBR and partitions is to use a DOS boot disk and boot to DOS. The use the freeware gdisk utility like this: gdisk 1 /mbr /wipe if you have a second drive: gdisk 2 /mbr /wipe

Are you booting XP from your RAID?

New Motherboard? Did you flash the BIOS to the latest version?

Using Gosh's method WILL use the same resources. But you will see them listed in many different directories. Duplicate files (like the cab files in the i386 directory) will show up in all the different directories, but only take the space of one the files. Yes, it's magic.

And we could re-package the downloads with embeded spyware for added revenue! /just kidding Sounds like a good idea.

Thaks for the info IcemanND, that's a nice utility. I didn't know it even existed However, won't that command disable the "whole" 1394 port? I don't want to disable the firewire port, just the network connection. I'd like to leave the firewire port active so people can still use their ipods and stuff.

You can put your customized winnt.sif file in the I386 directory of your UACD. During setup Windows will look for the winnt.sif file on the floppy disk, then in the I386 directory. I'm not sure if you can put the winnt.sif file on other removable media (like a usb flash disk), I've never tried it.

Almost all new motherboards come with on-board firewire ports (IEEE-1394). Windows XP will setup these ports as a Network Card during unattended installation. It shows up under network properties as a "1394 Connection". I'm tired of having to manually go into Network Properties and disable this interface. Has anyone figured out how to automatically disable the "1394 Connection". Maybe some winnt.sif setting or a script?

Incroyable HULK, Thanks for the post of your srvpack.inf - very informative. However, I was wondering... did you /integrate KB891861 (Update Rollup 1) into your source? or, did you just manually create the srvpack.inf and leave the Windows 2000 I386 directory SP4 standard?

Nooooo! All my secrets! Published for all to see!

I can't thank you enough for posting that DJ Prem. I've been waiting for this thing for a month now