jaclaz

YOU should make it (the PE) from YOUR Windows files, THEN you add to the build the winntsetup. Windows PE .iso's are NOT redistributable. jaclaz

Likely you have some Group Policy settings that creates this behaviour? jaclaz

I think that 7 is possible also on USB 3, with a few tweaks/added drivers, but it may depend on the USB 3.0 contreoller. Vista is of course possible on USB, the basic, manual way was detailed by Dietmar some 15 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20071009071622/http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=14181&st=1700&p=118931&#entry118931 cannot say/remember if there are (more evoluted/more automated) new ways/tools. There is a small service that prevents the reset of the USB bus registry values, though it wasn't apparently tested on Vista, it works just fine on both XP and 7 (and 8/8.1) so likely it will work on Vista too: https://github.com/vavrecan/usb-boot-watcher jaclaz

Personally, if there is not a suitable "pure" Windows tool that does what I need, I try to find MSYS[1] MinGW ports from Linux, because even the basic Cygwin .dll's are way too large for my (again, personal) tastes. jaclaz [1] Corrected, thought "MinGW" and wrote "MSYS"

Yep, but when compared to a "normal" install of a "recent" MS OS, let's say 20 GB, it is "only" 4-5x. jaclaz

Or in other words (see my previous post) something like 30x the size a NT System would normally need. We need a superlative for "bloat" to use in cases such as this one. BLOATER? BLOAT^2? jaclaz

Yep , and also, post your COMPLETE config.sys and autoexec.bat. jaclaz

I'll provide a single point anecdata. I bought a flat at a very young age, in 1984, nothing fancy, a small, average looking flat,in an average area in the city, in an average building, suitable to live in one or two people (single or young couple). At the time I was a sort of apprentice, at the lowest possible (legal) pay (for full-time work), my wage (net, i.e. real money that went in my pockets) was around 700,000-800,000 Lire/month and the cost of the flat was around 70,000,000 Lire + (if I recall correctly) some 3,500,000 Lire taxes, and notary and other fees.. Thus the flat equated roughly to 100 x basic monthly/wage. At the time a more than average pay was 1,100,000-1,200,000 and a very good one in the 1,500,000-1,600,000 range (or double the minimum one). Nowadays a comparable apartment would probably sell for something in the 180,000-220,000 Euro range. The lowest possible (legal) pay is now around 900-1000 Euro range (again, net, in the pocket). An average wage now is 1,300-1,500 Euro and a very good one in the 1,800-2,000 range. Do the math on the value as ratio on the wages, no matter the increase in value of the property, the point is that a young man starting his career (if any) today cannot simply afford what I could afford 35 years ago, the ratio is doubled, 200 instead of 100. jaclaz

Sure , that is the whole point. I had the impression that our friend Gansangriff was going to enter into a typical Chesterton's Fence fallacy: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton's_Fence jaclaz

There was NO line drawn until you drew it at "thousands years" (confirming my tentative two thousand years one): to swiftly cross it and going "New Orleans", only a few hundreds years old, and flooded not because of the original planning/positioning, but rather for the incompetence of the contemporary. But the good things with lines drawn on sand (from the Nile shore) is that they can be easily deleted. jaclaz

Well, no, wrong parallel, and "fools" from the wrong period.. I don't think that any one founded New Orleans thousands of years ago, those that did that circa 1718-1725 should have known what to expect and of course the descendants of those "fools" are those that are to be blamed for public schools, etc. or for not fleeing (tens, not thousands of years ago). Curiously enough, New Orleans was actually planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrien_de_Pauger but of course only the basic French Quarter, I believe that most of the rest of the city was later built without any care or planning, and everything was (poorly) modified and "patched" over the course of the following two centuries. And of course most of the damages of the various floods is connected with failure (bad engineering and construction) of the levees and flood walls : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_levee_failures_in_Greater_New_Orleans let us not mix together modern incompetence with the ancient (outstanding) building abilities. jaclaz

BUT what will be delivered will invariably be a city almost, but not quite, completely unlike functional or pleasant to live in. They (city planning architects) are #3 in my list of "unreliable experts" (for the record #1 are astrologists, closely followed at #2 by economists). To their (all three of them) credit: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/ jaclaz

Technically, the "fools" used to build cities/villages either on top of hills (easier to defend from enemies/invaders) or along rivers (ready availability of water and often possibility of using the river for transportation via boat), the choice to evaluate was between risks of floods and risks of landslides. The fact that you (and me, and everyone else) exist and are alive after a couple thousand years should mean that all in all the plan of the "fools" worked.

Quickbms is a tool that needs a sort of plugin/script for each file type. It simply makes no sense whatever to say "quickbms spews out errors and nothing extracted or given". There is a RIff parser on its page, that may (or may not) work "as is". Very likely what you have in your hands is a corrupted file (hence the Macromedia cannot open it) and it is possible that the Riff plugin may need some tweaks/changes. jaclaz

Yep, that is the idea. Let's say you have an Administrator level account on the OS (with unknown password). You login (via the by-pass) to that account (with empty password), then you can do any of these four: 1) change that same account password 2) change another account password 3) create a new account (and of course set its password) 4) do nothing on accounts and logout The only thing you cannot do is recover/decode existing passwords (BTW it is usually possible but the procedure is complex and lengthy). The way the by-pass is implemented in these tools is a small binary modification (patch) of a .dll, so, if you leave it patched, basically you can access any account without password, and it is of course recommended to un-patch the file as soon as you have done the whatever you had to do. jaclaz

Try TriD before anything else. https://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html Anyway, likely it is a RIFX file: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/RIFX Possibly you can use QuickBMS: http://aluigi.altervista.org/quickbms.htm jaclaz

Well, a file address is essentially: 1) an offset (actually a cluster number) 2) a length 3) a file name (+ other metadata, such as creation date/time, last modified date/time, etc.) If you have #1 and #3 but #2 is 0, you can change #2 to (say) 500, then 700, then 1000, then 1200 (i.e. until you have the whole file). If you do not have #1 but not #2 and not #3 you can still "carve directly" the disk until you find the beginning of the file and then copy 1200 bytes starting from that (you will have lost file name and other metadata but you will still be able to recover contents). Apart .txt files (that by definition are "headerless" and "footerless", they are simple, plain, raw "text") most other files format have either a recognizable header, or a recognizable footer (or both) and thus searching the disk for these recognizable patterns will give you results, additionally some file formats have also internal structures from which you can derive size and other metadata. This, until the file is not fragmented, i.e. it is contiguous. So this is an excellent reason to keep files as contiguous as possible (i.e. run - within limits - defrag or similar often): data recovery will be much more likely to succeed. jaclaz

For XP you can also use just fine PassPass via grub4dos, as a matter of fact also on later 32 bit systems, it is the 64 bit versions that ahve specific patching patterns: http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=18588 Please note how this is a method to by-pass the password, not to recover the old one, but once in you will be able to create a new user and then change existing user passwords. Since you are dual booting with 7, you should be able to use just fine from the 7 the good ol' WindowsGate: https://web.archive.org/web/20161029183021/http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=21204 If you have issues finding these (oldish) tools, just say so and I'll see how to provide you with a copy. But you should be able to use (still from 7) the PEPassPass (i.e. the AutoIt version): http://reboot.pro/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=533 jaclaz

Good and - in order to add idiocy to idiocy - the first link in your search result reads: (emphasis is mine) which could be something I could write (I mean, myself personally, NOT one of the primary software related companies in the world) on my personal blog because I cannot understand how to format the html or how to configure a database search, or the rendering engine or *whatever* or because I have limited access to some site settings. jaclaz

And everyone (at those companies) is excited (actually announces how he/she/it is excited) about the coming event and the life-changing breakthroughs that will be revealed then.. 404's? That is so '90's, they already changed most of them to a "redirect to home page, and search[1]" with no meaningful message, AFAICR. jaclaz [1] or, even better, get Windows 10 and search[2] [2] or, even better, get Windows 10 and use Cortana to search

The 1.7 should be the one in which support for NT 4.00 and 9x/Me was dropped, so the 1.5.9 you found might be the last-last one working on your system, possibly better than 1.5.25. The BLOAT in this one is strong. It must somehow be evidenced how a FULL install of NT 4.00 is (was) around 120-150 MB and that a reduced but still fully working system was more like 50-60 MB or however it could fit (with some spare space and commonly used programs) on a "common" (at the time) 100 MB Iomega Zip Disk. A common (at the time of NT 4.00, circa 1995-1996) internal disk (IDE) was in the range 1-2.1 GB, and TOP LEVEL workstations (imagine running Autocad and similia professionally in an architectural/engineering context) had - maybe - a single 9 GB (SCSI) disks, more commonly a single 4-5 GB one jaclaz

AFAICR, Minimal Power Management is one of the 6 "standard levels": https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/dfe9e5eb-02fe-4391-a619-e4d067f712f8/adjusting-power-settings-in-windows-xp-sp3-via-registry What happens with powercfg? jaclaz

It is an interesting question, to which you already answered yourself, but - unfortunately -"wrongly". If you delete the contents and save the cleared file you are not shredding anything. Please follow me. Let's say that your file was originally (for the sake of the example) any size bigger than 1024 bytes (i.e. normally 2 sectors) and smaller than 4 kB (i.e. the common size of a NTFS filesystem cluster), assume 1200 bytes. At filesystem level the smallest accessible unit is the cluster, i.e. your file is addressed (more or less) with these info/instructions: 1) cluster #123456 is occupied (all 4096 bytes in it are cluster #4096) 2) it is occupied by a filed called "mynicefile.txt" 3) the length of this file is 1200 bytes When you ask Notepad (or similar) to open that file, the instructions the OS and filesystem driver perform are roughly: 1) get to the beginning of cluster #123456 2) read 1200 bytes (the length of the file) from that start position When you simply Save (in Notepad or similar) the file without modifications the instructions the OS and filesystem driver perform are roughly: 1) get to the beginning of cluster #123456 2) write 1200 bytes (the current length of the file) from that start position Once you open the file in notepad in it, select all, delete, then save, the instructions the OS and filesystem driver perform are roughly: 1) get to the beginning of cluster #123456 2) write 0 bytes (the current length of the file) from that start position So, no shredding of sorts happens, the whole contents of the file are still on cluster #123456, only they are not anymore addressed/indexed (as the length of the file is now 0 bytes). Now, if you have a 1200 bytes file, you open it, and replace each character with a random one (or with a fixed one, whatever) and save, as long as the file after the edit is 1200 bytes, then the whole length of the previously saved file will be overwritten, and you will have sort of "shredded" the file contents. An even more interesting question (that you didn't ask) is another one: What happens if I write a .txt file around 700 bytes in length, save it, then continue typing until I reach 1200 bytes, save again, then decide to re-open it and "shred" it by replacing every character in it with something else and save again? Surprisingly, on NTFS (on a common 512 bytes/sector device) the answer is that the original (roughly 700 bytes in length) file is "carved in stone" (in the $MFT) and can still be integrally recovered. On new disks with 4096 bytes/sector the size of the file becomes around 3700 bytes https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/general/mft-resident-data/ https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/general/mft-resident-data/#post-6565939 https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/general/delete-file-in-safe-way/#post-6587693 jaclaz

jaclaz

Before 1.7 there was 1.5.25: http://www.crouchingtigerhiddenfruitbat.org/Cygwin/timemachine.html Now senselessly called "legacy". http://ctm.crouchingtigerhiddenfruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/setup/setup.html http://ctm.crouchingtigerhiddenfruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/circa-legacy/index.html That should be last version running on NT 4.00 or 9x. jaclaz