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stans4

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  1. A rather late reply to this. Far better is the use of a smart card, this is in wide use by the US military, has encryption certificates on board as well as other info. Shove it into the keyboard slot and login with a PIN. Email is automatically authenticated. Best of all, MS has already written the APIs for support. The slot has read-only capability, so USB ports can be disabled, closes that security hole. Downside is cost and upkeep. Somebody will always lose their card, so someone has to be detailed to maintain the card database and issue/reissue cards. You'd have the same problem with USB dongles, too. Cards are easier to store in wallets than dongles, though. Actual passwords on a dongle is a bad idea, an outsider finding such now has the keys to the castle. Stan
  2. I believe you've got something more needed other than just assigning a drive letter using the management tool. XP has no SATA controller drivers included with it, so they have to be added, either slip-streamed or after installation. It's the CONTROLLER that needs the drivers not the drive. This would account for your optical drive not showing up. There are no "standard" SATA controllers, so all the drivers are different. Usually a motherboard has an install disk with controller drivers on it, would be the first place to look. Take a look first in the Device Manager for controllers under SCSI and Raid Controllers, Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager. If there's an entry with the yellow triangle icon, it's probably the SATA controller without a driver. SATA controllers show up as SCSI. Go through the Update Drivers procedure to add in the SATA controller driver from your MB disk. Then you can add the drive via the management utility and partition, format it and assign drive letter(s) as needed. You might want to download the latest from the MB site. Some BIOSes have a way to run SATA in a crippled mode so they look like IDEs to the OS, you might look in the BIOS to see if you have such a mode for the SATA controller, just for future diagnostic needs. Stan
  3. If S.M.A.R.T is squawking, it's just a matter of time before the drive will be unusable, you'll continue to pick up bad spots. I've gone through this multiple times this last year(lots of drives spinning here). This is NOT a firmware issue, you've got an actual failing drive there, bad spots will NOT be recovered, they're actual defects, the data that used to be there is GONE. Get a spare of same or larger size, quick, and image what you can off of of it. Then send it in for warranty replacement, if you can. I use DFSee(www.dfsee.com) to do actual drive imaging, there are other products. Bad spots WILL be detected, DFSee will let you bypass them. You'll have to determine which files or file structures they belong to later. If it's a non-system disk, you can use xcopy from the command line with the proper options, you'd have to partition and format the new drive first, though. Xcopy will also ignore errors, pipe the output to a text file to pick up the files with errors later. If you're lucky, the current crop of bad spots will be in files you can replace from backups. For fastest transfer, add the new drive as an additional disk to the MB controller. If the failing drive is already pulled, you can use eSATA or a USB-SATA adapter to do the job. Eventually, you'll get too many bad spots and you won't be able to acces the file system. Then you get to see what can be pulled off using DFSee's data recovery functions. So don't wait too long! Stan
  4. I've never used winhex and don't know its capabilities. As I stated in another post, my tool of choice is DFSee, www.dfsee.com. Free full-featured, but time-limited, demo. If you select the partition of interest and set it to NTFS file type, there are a number of diagnostics you can run. DFSee squawks all the time about non-aligned partitions, the later file systems have gotten away from cylinder/head/sector concepts(being a fiction these days, anyway) and use absolute sector numbers for finding things. Things don't HAVE to be aligned. So your current structure is probably fine, being NTFS. If all you want is to recover what files you can, it'll make a list of what it finds from the MFT structures, you can select any or all files to copy to a work drive after that. There's a menu pick for recovering files, deleted or not. With a large drive, this can take a number of hours or days. Like 3 days with a 640G notebook drive. You will need a work drive of the same size or larger than the dud one to do that. My first action would be to look at the partition table structure and see what the media type is. I've had Windows randomly change media types and then it won't boot anymore. Putting it back the way it was fixes things. I don't know why it does it, but I've had 98SE, NT, 2000 and XP all do it. Usually, but not always, it hits a USB mass storage device. It's messed up boot drives that way before. Another thing I've done is to get another drive of the same make and model, partition it exactly the same as the dud, then use DFSee to save the partition tables off to the work drive. Make a copy of the dud, use DFSee to insert the partition structure from the file, reboot Windows to see the revised drive, do a chkdsk to check it out and see what can be seen. That usually works unless there's a hardware problem or things have been zeroed out. The "magic matchbox" is a great tool for this type of thing, being a USB->IDE/SATA adapter. One I use can be seen here: http://kingwin.com/products/cate/accessories/adapters/usi_2535.asp, runs about $10. There are other makes. Or you can use eSATA or an empty drive position in your machine. I prefer not to have to tear the machine apart just to change drives for diagnostics all the time, YMMV. Stan
  5. I'll jump in here, the majority of my recovery efforts have turned out mostly favorable, although the time invested wouldn't be economically practical if I were doing it for pay. I mostly use a tool called DFSee, this isn't freeware, but it's relatively cheap for what it does. www.dfsee.com Try-before-you-buy, demo-time-limited, full featured for demo use. Method of attack depends on what actually happened. If just the boot sector is zapped, DFSee can generate another and replace it. If a partition table is zapped, it can replace that from the duplicate copy. From there it gets dicier. If your major disk structures like boot sector, partition tables and extensions are ALL zapped, best bet is to buy a disk of the same brand and size, partition it the same as the dud, then SAVE OFF the partition structures to a work drive. DFSee can restore these structures to the zapped drive and after a chkdsk, things will probably work. Best to do an image backup copy of the zapped drive to another drive and save the original. Can be backed up to your just-bought new drive AFTER saving the partition structures to a work disk. If catalog structures are damaged, the above may get things up to the point where you can recover at least some things by copying from the damaged folders. DFSee can also build a list of what it can find out there and recover the stuff to another work drive. I managed to accidentally partially reformat a drive one time late at night and recovered all but about 5 gigs of stuff which was mostly repeated on another copy of the drive, the stuff I'd just added was recovered. For much other than that, you're going to have to get well-educated on file structures and how the OS works with them. DFSee has an editor feature, you can change any bit on the disk, if you like. Have had to do that when I had one machine that insisted on randomly changing FAT32-formatted USB flash and hard drives to media type 12. This caused them to disappear. Changed them back to FAT32 media type and everything was back. If you use DFSee to save all ALL your system partitions before you have problems, it's relatively easy to recover. Paying users get support for problems from the author. Comes with versions that run under Windows, Dos, Linux and OS2. If you follow the directions, you can get a version up that uses Grub off a flash card or memory stick to boot into a version of Partition Magic under Linux, then USB ports are accessible as well as most files system types. You have to know how to run things from the command line and basic Linux commands, though. It can be added to BartPE, if you're Windows-centric, I haven't gotten USB to run under BartPE on any of my machines, though. Have switched to the Linux-based version for most recovery work. It's a menu-driven text system, no flashy graphics, not a lot of extensive help features. Small, in other words. None of this stuff is going to be run-it-and-it-works magic, you DO have to know what the basic structures are that you're working with, the DFSee site has some basic scenarios and links to disk structure info, it's up to you to figure out what needs to be done. I've been wrestling with this stuff for over 20 years and still don't know it all. It's been reduced from major disaster to lengthy pain-in-the butt, though. Stan
  6. Have you checked to see that the WiFi adapter is on? It's easy to punch the button and turn it off on mine. The message you got is similar to what I get when that happens. Another item to check is to see that the "Wireless Zero Configuration" service is started, Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services. I've found that mine reverts to "Manual" mode after a reboot and WiFi just doesn't connect without it. Some adapters/laptops have their own utility to do the connection, so it may be OK if it's off. Just a couple of things to check. WiFi can be frustrating to troubleshoot without another machine to see what's really going across the air. Stan
  7. Only way I can see to get the "free trial" version back is to do a system restore, if your laptop has that feature. I know the Acer I have has a hidden partition where all the starter software gets put, has a utility to zap the whole working partition and put it back to as-delivered condition. There's also a utility that gets run at first startup that will burn restore CD/DVDs that allow restoring just parts of the initial software. If you've still got that, then you can probably restore the trial version. You'd have to look at your docs to see. If you've zapped your hard drive or swapped for another, start looking on the auction sites. Any downloads you might find, short of off the MSDN subscription site, are going to be suspect. Office XP is long out of support, you probably can't even get replacement discs from MS anymore. If you never paid for the real deal after the free trial ran out, your key is useless anyway. One of the very first things I do with a new laptop/netbook is to extract the hard drive and run an image backup. Then I can get back to square one if I need to. After that, I partition the thing the way I want, not the way the OEM thought it should be. Stan
  8. Just thought of something else, a lot of those drives have a partition with software in them designed to autorun and install when plugged in. If you allow autorun, it may be locking things up that way. Just a thought. Stan
  9. Not really enough data, what SP level are you at? How is the drive formatted, FAT32 or NTFS? Can you plug it in to a different PC and connect? ME may not count, it's got some built-in limits on how big a drive it can use. If you tried writing to it from that, it may need a reformat before you can do anything. I have had this happen with USB flash sticks that have had damaged media type codes, I had to use DFSee to look at the partition table and straighten things out manually. I've used up to 1.5TB drives on a USB-SATA adapter on W2K with no problems. That's basically what's in those fancy packaged external cases. Stan
  10. This sounds to me like a hardware issue, like the connectors are damaged, solder is cracked or similar mechanical fault. I've had this happen with on-the-MB USB connectors, so it's not unknown. All the card pulling/replacing and driver installing does no good if the connectors themselves are buggered. USB cards are cheap to replace these days, like $10-15, get one with an NEC chipset and you'll be golden. Those are about the only ones I've found that you can get the spec'd power out of. VIAs suck. Stan
  11. Are you replacing the hard drive? Base 98SE hates today's larger hard drives. Can be patched, but the original disk doesn't have the newer code. One reason guys build custom 98SE install CDs, there's a project or two on this site to do that. You can do a step by step reboot and see which module fails on loading, a log file can be useful, too, if you can get into Safe mode to read it. Processor speed won't have anything to do with it. Onboard peripherals might. Stan
  12. stans4

    Long story

    For components with laptop OEM Vista-only drivers, you get to find out what chip is used, then go to the chipmaker OEM website and see what you can dredge out for example drivers. Sometimes these are buried in a passworded FTP site intended only for OEM laptop makers' use, in which case you're screwed. You then get to do the google driver chase thing. Wireless is probably the toughest thing to get working, sometimes makers will use different chips on cards with the same or very similar model numbers. Sometimes the only way to find out stuff is to crack open the laptop and see what the chips actually are. Unlikely Liteon was the chipmaker, they probably just relabeled somebody else's module and changed the PCI bus ID. If they did that, you may get to do some .inf file editing when you actually DO find a driver for the chip. If the chip is TOO new, there may not have been an XP driver ever written for it. There is a way around it for many laptops, a lot of these use mini-PCI cards for wireless, these can be easily interchanged and you can find replacements on the open market. Just make sure if you get one that's it's got XP drivers. Solving software problems via hardware. I had to try 3 different drivers for the wireless card in the one Acer and go to a Atheros site in .cz land to get it before it would come up under XP correctly. Only had to go through 2 sets of Intel XP drivers to get the SATA working, the Intel retarded graphics chipset video driver worked right off. If your PCI bus controller isn't working, you probably need to find out what the motherboard's chipset is and go get the XP drivers for it before proceeding any farther. Vista->XP on laptops sometimes takes a few weeks(or longer if you don't have good luck). My practice has been to clone the original drive onto a bigger one, install and use THAT one for all subsequent installs and general jacking around. The last time I did one of these conversions, I just did a regular "in-place upgrade" of XP right over the top of Vista, this preserved everything that was previously installed. Still had to do the driver chase to get everything working under XP, though. Sometimes the supplied laptop utlities aren't ALL crapware, sometimes they do some rather critical functions, like power control and video port control. Blast the drive and wipe out the recovery partition and you'll never know, until you need it and don't have it. Stan
  13. Doubtful, it'd have to work with every single SATA controller chip out there and there's dozens, if not hundreds, of different makes and models. There might be one that covers one manufacturer's family of chips, though. What I've done is to include drivers for the most popular SATA chips on my boot disk, then do the driver chase if I run across one that's not included(usually laptop). A universal driver would be a Good Thing, just don't think it really exists. It's not like the days with floppy or ST506/402 controllers where the register interface was firmly defined. Stan
  14. I've had this happen on earlier versions of Windows, icons and screen widgets just turn into black blobs. It was usually caused by some form of memory leak in an application that used a lot of system memory. You might look for a newer video driver(outside chance), otherwise you're going to have to have some sort of system logging going on so you can see what's causing the problem. Tracking these things down without some sort of system logging is kind of futile unless you can nail it down to one action or application that causes the problem every time. 98SE used to do this a lot when it ran out of heap memory when I was doing a lot of picture editing with a screwed-up editor. Stan
  15. The only polishing system I've had work consistently is the Skip Dr(http://digitalinnovations.com/Merchant5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=DI&Category_Code=SkipDr). Make sure what you get is a repair device, not just a cleaner. And if the CD is scratched on top, there's no hope. I've had maybe 1 disk out of a hundred that wasn't correctable enough that I couldn't get a rip off of it. Sometimes takes multiple passes through the polisher if the scratch is deep. And sometimes you only get one pass, make sure your rip is good! Alternative, find somebody that has an MSDN subscription and download the W2K+SP4 disk image. That should be a commercial image, with a proper retail key you should be in business. Stan
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