jaclaz

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a drone? Naah , it's the "Orbit"! http://brainstorms.puzzlebox.info/ http://orbit.puzzlebox.info/ The actual news are that it is Brain-controlled..... If you get to challenge Professor Xavier ....: jaclaz

Well, I beg to differ. Set aside the "niche" needs of audio producing, those were the times when (a VERY brief period, UNfortunately) I had ALL Windows NT 4.00 machines, with data saved on a separate partition (casually around 650 Mb in size) and a single SCSI external CD burner. Backup meant that every day of the week a different user would get the SCSI burner, and simply burn to a CD the WHOLE set of DATA out of his/her machine before going at home. When the need arose for tape backup, then the headaches started. Till today there is NOT such a simple way (short of replicating/duplicating on other hard disks) way to backup, of course the reason is to be attributed to industry that failed to deliver a storage media (optical, Magneto-optical, holographic, *whatever*) capable of enough capacity AND to the good MS guys (and ALL or almost ALL the programmers that followed and still follow their stupid "guidelines/approaches") and spread meaningful info *anywhere* (the Program Files, the Registry, the actual place where DATA is, the User folder(s), etc.). jaclaz

Just for the record, on the "enterprise" side I remember no particular "wows" at Windows 95 (let alone at FAT32). The .pif vs. .lnk argument is simply senseless. The "desktop paradigm" was already common in Windows 3.x (at least in my experience). Remember that any DOS user (in his right mind) would have had at the time two "compulsory" third party softwares: Norton Utilities Norton Commander and most of them would have had (as soon as it came out) the Norton Desktop, see: FAT32 came later than 95, it was first in OSR 2 (which was an OEM only release, i.e. you couldn't have it without having it bundled with new hardware): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Editions That means (flatly) that FAT32 was NOT available in enterprise before August 1996 and ONLY on new machines. Again *any* enterprise would have been running NT 3.51 since one year and the real "break through" for them would have been the new interface of NT 4.00. I remember at the time how the enterprise was (correctly) "forked", "real" machines would be expensive "work PC's" with NT 4.00 and "secretary machines" would be cheap PC's with the bundled Windows 95. jaclaz

Sure. Yep , BUT NOT a "good idea" when the disk drive or the filesystem on it is presumed to be needing a CHKDSK to be fixed. jaclaz

You mean like in: http://usefulwindows.com/2012/10/fix-for-the-screen-resolution-is-too-low-for-this-app-to-run/ and: http://mobileoffice.about.com/od/netbooks/a/How-To-Change-Your-Netbooks-Screen-Resolution.htm It depends on the video driver: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/37861-display1_downscalingsupported jaclaz

To get a "surely working" recovery console you can use this approach: http://reboot.pro/?showtopic=2254 OR this one: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20983 OR this one: http://reboot.pro/topic/11393-recovery-console-xp2003-builder/ For the intended use, you will need anyway to check for the existence of autochk.exe on the built media, but different SP versions, at least limited to checking the filesystem (i.e. unless possibly if you run some other programs) should not be relevant at all (i.e. you can run the chkdsk of a - say - SP1a Recovery Console on a disk on which an XP SP2 or SP3 is installed). jaclaz

Formfiller forgot bolding/underlining/highlighting a sentence in his quote jaclaz

The thing that is most likely to burn is the motor controller (often called SMOOTH chip), but normally it is evident by visual inspection (if that happened because of "too much current + bad contacts"). Example: http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=16737&start= The usual procedure is however to find a "donor drive" with the EXACT SAME PCB and transfer the ROM chip from the old one to the "new" one. jaclaz

Or to think having greater security. Deemed by whom/where? Mind you I have NO idea about the actual reliability of the specific thingy, it is very possible that it actually is the third best thing in life (after ice cream and sliced bread) but anyway tagging it outright as "best" is IMHO a bit "uphill". jaclaz

That's good, if it was possible to do that, then it would become a non secure solution. Seriously, WHY (the heck) do you want to have a tool (BTW of very dubious reputation) that automatically runs? jaclaz

No, nothing that you can do yourself, and head failures are basically of two kinds: head failure (simply) head failure because of head(s) sticking to a platter (or platters) if #1 a professional with the appropriate tools/methods should be able to recover data (all of them) after having performed a head transplant. if #2 the amount of data that can be recovered by the same method above might be very little or none at all. jaclaz

@ehsantlk Are you insulating Head or Motor contacts? Try CLEANING/VERIFY contacts. If they are good, then unfortunately it is likely to be a broken/dead head. jaclaz

Sure, there is a whole family of Virus/Malware that arbitrarily change Office related keys in the Registry if the user is so reckless as to change the permission of a specific Office related key. Seriously, make a backup of the Registry, try setting that key to "Everyone", and see IF that is the cause (it is one of the possibilities, not necessarily the real reason). IF that is NOT the cause, THEN you restore the backup and have NOT to worry about the altered permissions. jaclaz

Is there a difficult part in: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/838687/en-us jaclaz

You don' t have the word "greed" in your dictionary? Just in case : http://www.thefreedictionary.com/greed It can be even worse than that. While most firms are obviously (even if somehow "greedy") "professional", I was reported in a few occasions of "ransom like" approaches. Basically you pay a "flat fee" for the exam of the drive, the firm would recover the contents, but provide you only with a DIR of the files found, asking for some money (the usual range between US$ 500 and 1,200) to recover the files. If you accept and pay the money you get your files back, if you don't and ask the drive back they give you back another drive (always photocopy the label of the disk AND mark in a corner the PCB and the aluminum case with a couple little scratch and take a picture of them before handing a disk to any external firm) or give you back your drive, BUT with the data wiped/mingled and re-bricked. You then try yourself (and fail) and or find another firm that (in perfect good faith) cannot recover anything so you go back to the "first" one. This time however the cost for the recovery (which they can still do ) is doubled or tripled.... Well, JFYI, that is another nice urban myth. The number of actual clean rooms in data recovery shops in a mid-sized industrial country can usually be counted on fingers without taking your shoes off. What is written on the site/advertisement is "clean room", what actually exists/is used is generally a laminar flow workbench. JFYI: jaclaz

Yeah, sure, I also had a couple experience with cars, one bad, one good. Many years ago I had an Alfetta (gasoline, automatic gearbox) which engine decided to blow up at a mere 250.000 Kms. More recently I passed the 350,000 km landmark on my Toyota Hilux (diesel, manual gearbox) without a hitch. I am pretty sure that a lot of people have experienced something similar with wives/husbands/partners (one bad, one good). Just in case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence Seriously, Windows 98 Scandisk (obviously on a FAT filesystem, and specifically on a overheating disk drive) and CHKDSK (most probably on a NTFS filesystem on a normally working disk drive) are two such different thiings that you can hardly compare them (the only similarity is that both have d,s and k in their name ). jaclaz

Have you checked permissions for the Registry? From the KB you found: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/838687/en-us Those are "generic" kind of possible issues. The "full path" to the key (UNLIKE what stated in you post) should be: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common There may be another key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common which should be the one you found /but that is not seemingly the one creating the 1406 error) jaclaz

I personally find the whole idea of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) as being second in stupidity only to the cloud (when it comes to security, privacy, integrity of data). But I would like to understand what other members think of the idea/approach, if they have any experience (poositive/negative/neutral) about it, etc. Some "introductory" reference: http://www.cio.com/article/703511/BYOD_If_You_Think_You_re_Saving_Money_Think_Again?page=1 http://www.cio.com/article/721478/2013_Prediction_BYOD_on_the_Decline_ http://www.cultofmac.com/156511/byod-failure-five-big-reasons-why-employees-dont-want-to-use-their-iphones-ipads-at-work/ http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/31062/companies-failing-to-get-a-grip-on-byod/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/09/sec_security_snafu/ http://www.darkreading.com/advanced-threats/researcher-to-demo-spy-phone-at-black-ha/240157439 And some personal ideas on the matter: http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=10567/ jaclaz

Who knows? Try and see. Each motherboard manufacturer (exactly like it happened with BIOS) may have provided (or completely failed to provide) *everything* (and the contrary of it) and may have provided it (or completely failed to provide it) in either UEFI only mode, BIOS only mode or mixed mode and additionally Windows 7 or Windows 8 (and Windows XP) may "react" to these in different ways. It is "vague", I would say "extremely vague", that is essentially the point about UEFI being a non-standard and knowing from experience how BOTH the motherboard manufacturers (or BIOS programmers or both) and Microsoft have failed to deliver over the years full, integral, fail-proof adherence to actual standards (but took them more or less as "general advice" and largely ignored them or managed to develop deviating, "custom" standards or "proprietary dialects" of them) you can understand what you can expect from this mess. As an OT example, see what the XP Disk management can do when simply changing the active status of a partition on a disk partitioned by a later MS OS (and still within the MBR "standard"): http://reboot.pro/topic/9897-vistawin7-versus-xp-partitioning-issue/ to me this establishes that you normally cannot believe anyone (and particularly the good MS guys and their programs and docs) on anything. In other words, your mileage may (and will) vary. jaclaz

http://gigaom.com/2013/06/28/if-prism-doesnt-freak-you-out-about-cloud-computing-maybe-it-should-says-privacy-expert/ And, just for the record : http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_23554739/restricted-web-access-guardian-is-army-wide-officials jaclaz

In my simplicity, once booted to the recovery console, I would run a CHKDSK from there first thing. Please consider how the CHKDSK in recovery console has a slightly different syntax from the "real thing". http://best-windows.vlaurie.com/chkdsk.html http://commandwindows.com/recovery.htm The worst that can happen is that the thingy will take some time to execute. jaclaz

Already provided link: http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f217/solved-win7-64bits-uefi-mbr-need-infos-592835.html And link within: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2481490 And initial suggestion: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html Whatever you do, do the right thing http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097216/quotes?item=qt0362962 jaclaz

Yes and no. The EFI thingy was more or less "invented" by Intel. The real reason (originally and IMHO) being that of stopping giving away money to Award, Ami and similar BIOS making companies, officially to provide servers with a "more adequate to more powerful hardware base hardware interpreter". It failed miserably. Then Apple (more or less for the same reasons) started making Macintosh EFI based. TIll now, all that made sense (either proprietary hardware on Mac's or hardware - servers - limited to a niche of machines managed by IT guys). Then the good linux guys (possibly in perfect good faith) started supporting EFI/UEFI (thus contributing to it's success). And only "finally" the good MS guys had the brilliant idea (with the usual arrogance) to leverage on the capabilities of UEFI to make it "compulsory" for Windows 8 (coherently with the senseless push towards 64 bit OS) the "secure boot". Of course the "Secure boot" Microsoft made "compulsory" is not "secure" and in some cases it is not even "boot". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Criticism The real issue is that the thingy is senselessly complex, and since everyone can read the specifications "the way he/she likes" all the issues over the years with BIOS ( badly programmed BIOS code, senseless features added/removed, possibility to brick for good a motherboard, etc., etc. ) have not been particularly mitigated, let alone removed. BTW; if we are talking of "freedom" (about which the proprietary BIOS was largely criticized over the years), the first step you have to do to get the specifications is to give away your personal data in order to get to read the specs: http://www.uefi.org/specs/agreement And guess who are the members of the UEFI org? http://www.uefi.org/about/ Of course the request for providing data can be easily bypassed by simply using google and get directly to the download page. Just for the record, the simple current 2.3.1 specifications consists in a .pdf made of only 2180 pages . jaclaz

You are seemingly not familiar with "directional hmmmming" , it was aimed @submix8c . jaclaz

Hmmm. jaclaz