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Galileo Figaro

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  1. Isn't this matter something that the owners of the systems in question should take care of themselves? If they went trough the trouble of getting pirated license keys, despite already having legal keys, they should take the consequences of their actions. As a PC technician, it is not your job to police what keys or licenses people use. There's BSA for that. As I see it, these people bring in more work to you, which should be a good thing. Suggest a reformat and new installaton with the proper key. And charge for it.
  2. I have this same problem. Maybe it should be: AutomaticUpdates="yes" Since some other entry uses yes inside citation marks?
  3. The Repartition command kills everything on the disk, Windows, Linux, what have you. I'm not really sure but everything points to a full formatting.
  4. Have you checked out the driver pages of the SATA controller chip manufacturers? Like for instance Silicon Image: http://www.sci-worx.com/support/supportsea...amp;osid=3& Also, it seems that some chip manufacturers don't keep all their obsolete stuff on their support pages. For instance, SiS does have a UDMA driver for DOS, but you'll find it somewhere else than at the SiS support pages. The only other option I can think of is aquiring the W98 DDK, or Driver Development Kit, from Microsoft. I happened to stumble upon a complete package of it while looking for something entirely different on the web. The individual characteristics for each controller chip could perhaps be gathered from the BSD or Linux drivers for that chip. I don't know anything about writing drivers, I'm just speculating here. Well, maybe not quite, I did actually write one printer driver once, a long time ago. It was about printing out graphics on a daisy-wheel printer. That long ago. : ) I must say it is a bit surprising that despite all those programmers in the open source movement, no one has come up with the idea of developing, or backporting, drivers for older Windows versions. Could be because there's no money in it?
  5. Not too clear what you try to accomplish here? If there's an installed XP system on the machine, then the IDE-to-SCSI drive should be seen in the drive manager, even if it doesn't appear on the desktop. In the drive manager it can be formatted. Alternatively one could use Puppy Linux or Partition Magic and instead prepare the drive from there. Note that an IDE drive formatted on an IDE interface and then moved to a SCSI converter, to act as a faux SCSI drive, most likely won't be considered formatted under the SCSI regime. And vice versa. Is there a point of going the complicated route via IDE-to-SCSI conversion if the machine already has native ATA or IDE support? A good general advice in this case might be to strive to adhere to the motto: "Keep it Simple, Stupid".
  6. I have this friend who uses an HP dx2000 computer. The machine came with no installation media, but instead a hidden partition containing the XP Home installation files. Unfortunately, my friend destroyed this hidden partition in a fit of misguided geekness. Now he stands with a computer litterally without any OS, but with a license sticker containing the serial number for the XP Home Windows. The sticker also has HP imprinted on it. It is not clear to me whether that HP implies a OEM license or if it just indicates that the particular batch of licenses were destined for HP instead of Dell or something else. In order to help him, I need to know: Does the license sticker make it legal for me to use my own installation media on his computer? My media isn't HP specific, but generic. Also my CD isn't the Home type, but instead Professional. From what I've heard, the Professional and Home CDs are supposed to be almost identical, with the difference that some features are turned off on the Home version. Is it possibly so that the serial number on his sticker will make the installation program "realize" that it should install a Home version even though the CD is Pro? Also, does the "HP" part on the sticker suggest a cut down version (OEM) of the license or not? I don't intend to give him copies of my CD, since I'm a computer professional and can't afford to disregard licensing laws. If none of the above applies, what can he do? Besides from running Linux. Would it be OK for him to simply copy someone else's generic XP Home CD or does it have to be a HP specific XP CD? He does have a license on that sticker.
  7. Is that really a good idea? If you happen to forget the CD in the CDROM drive and then reboot, your rabbit is cooked. I wouldn't make it an automated process from CD. The whole idea about unattended install is that it can install the system without you sitting there at the table in front of it. But it surely isn't about one size fits all. Even if you'd be using this only privately, you'd want to change things from time to time and from machine to machine. There are unattended fdisk parameters, which you probably are aware of? These should take care of the FAT32 part. That plus the ordinary msbatch.inf should suffice to make a completely unattended install. Would you care to explain the parameters in that autoexec.bat of yours?
  8. One option not yet mentioned is using the parallel printer port for transfering installation files to the laptop's hard drive. This can be done by crossover cable (Laplink or Parcp) or by attaching an external box to the parallel port containing a CDROM player or hard drive inside. That box usually has some interface which translates the parallel port's logic to a standard IDE or ATA connector. A variation of the parallel port solution is using a parallel port ZIP drive. The ZIP disks are 100MB and there are drivers for both DOS and for all Windows systems. With 3 of these disks you'd have the installation files copied in 5 minutes. There are also ZIPs with 250MB capacity disks. Another option, not mentioned for obvious reasons, is the RS232 or serial port. In a similar manner to a Laplink or Parcp cable, a so-called null-modem cable connects your laptop to some other computer and then starts a long night and day of transferring the installation files. This is probably the slowest method of doing this. No matter what method you choose to transfer the installation files to your laptop drive, which you MUST do, because there's no CDROM reader, you end up with a local folder containing the complete set of installation files. In the case of W98 it is adviseable to let them stay there even after installation is completed. As soon as you make some change to your system, or install some piece of hardware, like a printer, the installed W98 system will again start asking you for installation files. I'd say the easiest method of doing this is that you take out that 2.5" laptop HDD and attach it internally to some other computer. If that other computer is a laptop, you don't even need any adapter between the 2.5" HDD connector and the bigger 3.5" HDD connector. After you've returned the drive to its original laptop, now filled with that installation folder, start up with DOS, cd to the install directory and type setup or install. Something like this: > C: cd W98 dir *.exe setup The above is from distant memory, so use your own judgement. A W98 installation should commence. Please note that you can not install directly from the serial or parallel port cable or devices. The same goes for USB on older machines. But if you had a SCSI card in the PCMCIA slot, and then a CDROM reader attached to that SCSI interface, you'd be able to install your OS directly from that.
  9. Have you tried first manually unpacking the self extracting installation file (directx_9c_redist.exe), with for instance WinRAR, and then running the dxsetup.exe?
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