James_A

Good choice. If you want the complete list of updates in SP3, there is a Microsoft KB article "List of fixes that are included in Windows XP Service Pack 3" http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946480/.

Have you tried disabling the "Do not display last user name" policy in Group Policy? Have you searched the registry for "DontShowLastUser"?

That HAS to be the understatement of the century. Several HUNDRED are labelled "security" or are actually security-related. Godd luck with SP2. I hope you have a really good hardware firewall. Otherwise you have about 10 minutes to get fully patched before your computer is (re-)infected. (source: SANS.org)

If Session Expiration is set (as it is on my board) then this behaviour is by design, as a security measure. See IPB Getting Started Guide for details.

Hi, See the topic HFSLIP in Add/Remove Programs? There you will find the answers to your questions: 1) "that is a very good indication that HFSLIP did its job!" (post#2) 2) You have to edit an INF file (post#10)

It's NOT obvious, because that's NOT the error. "Unable to load ... xactengine3_0.dll" occurs because of an earlier error. The actual error is higher up the log file: error = 0xc000001d means illegal instruction executed. I don't know why. Incidentally, this particular problem has been posted all over the Internet and nobody has a sensible reply.

Well, if you supply the floppies, I still have drives to read each of those.

For "install the latest OS last" I think all three of us are saying the same thing, just using different words: 1. Windows 98 first 2. Windows 2000 second

Thanks for that. Any chance of anyone updating the various patch lists? All are badly in need of a refresh. the_guy: last updated August Tomcat76: last updated April or June (depending on the list) (but February for the checksums: see next item) checksums by Super-Magician: last updated February and probably now abandoned (See this post by the author).

It's gone a bit quiet on my side, because I am still recovering from reading your dramatically recounted experience of moving your partitions round:... ... I am not sure what to do next. I think one way I may have slipped-up is by looking at your Boot.Ini file and assuming that you had IDE disks not SCSI. Now Ascii2 has explained why that is. I have been trying to find out some more information before posting again. For example, the function of arcsetup.exe and arcldr.exe. I have never seen or heard of a Windows 2000 system without these two files present. Until now. Admittedly, all the systems I have installed or repaired have had IDE drives. There must be some good BIOS support or emulation going on, otherwise how would Ranish (an MS-DOS program IIRC) load and work? Since your current C: drive contains valuable data, I would be treading much more carefully from now on. Referring to another of your earlier posts, repairing the MBR is seen as a big problem in some circles, which is why you see the oft-repeated advice to install the latest OS last. Sorry, I don't (yet) have anything more constructive to add.

Well, the OP may not have any more questions, but I have one of my own. Looking again at his first post, first sentence: Then, in another tab, putting up any post by this user and looking not at the contents of the post, but at the left-hand side, you will see why the OP has rather precisely and correctly phrased things in the present tense.Look not at the Group itself but at the top line (the custom profile info). See what it says? It seems to me that a joke in one culture has badly back-fired in another. Don't you think this is confusing?

I'm suitably impressed. I have friends/customers who can't achieve those times from standby, let alone fom POST. How do you do it on Vista, exactly?

I have read your post twice to make sure, but: really surprises me. Are you able to acquire an old version of PartitionMagic? This program, written by PowerQuest some years ago could do this partition conversion with ease without data loss. I used to use version 6.0 which handled Windows 2000 NTFS partitions as well, but not those created by Windows XP. I now use a free LiveCD with GParted on it, but must warn you that I once lost all the data on a FAT32 partition because of an error. Maybe the error was part GParted and partly my misunderstanding of an on-screen message, but I still hesitate in recommending it. PartitionMagic, incidentally, seems to be one of a long list of programs which Symantec have effectively killed-off by acquisition.

No, No, No, that's complete and utter rubbish. You have confused a licence granted under copyright law to copy the software, with a licence granted you to use the software. Do not make the elementary mistake (common amongst those with no legal training) of confusing the licence I referred to with the licence in the EULA. The advice first posted by Yzöwl is correct. My contribution was to distinguish civil and criminal matters -- which affects the court you appear in and what the layman means by the word "illegal", not whether you are liable or not -- I do not contradict either Yzöwl or jcarle.

Well copyright law is a civil, not criminal, matter in most jurisdictions so you would have Microsoft's lawyers after you, not the police. You still can't do it. Copyright law grants Microsoft the exclusive right to make copies. You cannot make copies and sell them unless you have a licence from Microsoft. And you will have to pay for the licence, if you ever get one. If you actually put some software on the disk that's likely to be a criminal matter as well. All of this civil -v- criminal stuff varies from country to country. Short explanation: Don't do it. At all.

I think I know why this: has happened.It's because the Windows 2000 version of NTLDR needs two additional files: arcldr.exe and arcsetup.exe. I now have a second theory why Dave's system won't work. Sometimes the boot sector in a logical partition has an incorrect value for the "hidden sectors". This value should be the number of sectors from the start of the disk to the boot sector, but is often only 63, which is the number of sectors to the last partition table. Again, to use Ninho's phrase, this would point to a regression from the Windows 2000 NTLDR to the Windows XP NTLDR. As with my last theory, I don't know for sure. The good news is that if D: is changed from a logical partition to a primary primary then Windows 2000 should still keep the same drive letters. The reason it is D: to start with, is that there are NO primary partitions on any other drives (see the screenshot posted above). What I don't know is whether Windows 98 will recognize a second primary partition at all, or maybe ignore it. Information around the Internet seems a bit vague about this and my old, old PartitionMagic manual has conflicting information on different pages.

The Knowledge Base also has the pages for Windows 2000: KB900345: Fixes that are included in the Update Rollup 1 dated June 28, 2005 KB327194: List of bugs that are fixed in Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 KB320853: List of bugs fixed in Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 If you scroll to the bottom of the list for Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 you will also find 3 links for Service Pack 2 and 3 links for Service Pack 1 as well. ____________________ Edit: the post below means me, but refers to my former user-name

To James_A please.

I stand corrected! I seem to be missing a critical update (to my brain).

Well, I might as well go ahead and give the answer that you are half-expecting, but everyone has so far avoided telling you --- NO! The key that Dell used to install Windows and the key on the sticker are compatible with each other and not with your VLK. It's not that simple to fix: the relevant .DLLs concerned with Product IDs and keys are different for OEM and VLK. From memory (a couple of years ago) the most likely scenario is that Windows will fail to start on the next reboot (BSoD) and/or Microsoft will reject Windows as non-genuine because of the key mismatch. I would not be upset if proved wrong, but I suspect that by the time you have replaced the relevant DLLs and corrected the relevant parts of the registry, you might as well have spent the same amount of time re-imaging with the proper version of the OS to start with.

Yes, to me it seems fine. Remembering that, according to Microsoft: Your boot files are on your system volume -- and Your system files are on your boot volume then you have NTLDR+NTDETECT.COM+BOOT.INI on C: and you have your Windows 2000 system on D:\WIN-NT according to my reading of both your screenshot and your BOOT.INI. Your screenshot also shows C: as a primary partition and D: as a logical partition which fully occupies an extended partition (See the green border around it in the screenshot.) I have been following this thread with a view to trying this myself, so I am *very* interested in what makes this work and what doesn't. The only thing I can think of is that your D: being in a logical partition, is in a slightly different place than if it were a primary partition. The two used to be exactly 63 sectors different when disks were a lot smaller and everything was ruled by CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) geometry. Microsoft used to advise against multiple primary partions that were readable by DOS because (IIRC) it led to DOS confusion and possible data loss. On the other hand Windows 2000 is perfectly happy with more than one Win-readable primary partition (and I've done it). The Win2000 NTLDR is parsing the MBR, finding the extended partition and then following the partition "chain" down the disk until it finds the logical partition. Is it possible that the WinXP NTLDR no longer does this? In other words does the WinXP NTLDR require both system volume AND boot volume to be primary partitions? That would account for the Win2000 NTLDR working and the WinXP NTLDR not. Does anyone else know for sure?

It makes it number 2, because C is not 0, it's 1. In the strange world of ARC syntax used in BOOT.INI: multi(X), disk(0), rdisk(Y) & partition(Z) X and Y begin at 0, but Z begins at 1 if the first word is "multi" then "disk" is always disk(0) So, multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) is the first partition of the first physical disk on the first disk controller.

I agree...