jaclaz

Get higher privileges: jaclaz

NO. Jaclaz's suggestion - INDEPENDENTLY from whether the OP will insist or not - is a pretty decent alternative. (personally I would call it "an excellent one" ) jaclaz

About pricing, I never managed to understand marketing strategies, but this one sounds even more "queer" than usual. If you have something that can be placed on the market (and be on average "competitive" against other similar product) for (say) US$ 100.00, the first thing the good marketing guys do is to price it at 99.99 (and there is a whole literature about how moronic are morons that "like" x.99 prices over the same y.00 same price), see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing This is stupid, but seemingly all over the world . Next step is (as said earlier) "bundling", basically you add to the product a number of other things that either have no or little costs or actual use or that are not actually much used but that are perceived as "added" value to "justify" the price. I will dare to say that in computing this is now the 64 bit Operating System (hey, my processor has more bits than yours!). Now, since you have all those added bits you must have more RAM to use them, right? And we nicely give you some more RAM that you wouldn't otherwise need for a very fair price. Then come the "promotions", such as "introductory offers". So you have this US$ 100.00 valued on the market product that you price 99.99 with an introductory offer of (still say) 20% discount and place it on the market at 79.99 instead of the "regular" price of 99.99. Supposing that this is actually (or it is soon to become) a hot selling item, the marketing guru's will be LIMITED but the actual to apply this introductory offer to ONLY a limited amount of items. This is logical, you have some sound calculations that to cover development, manufacturing, advertising, shipment, etc. costs you have to sell, say 1,000,000 units at 100.00, i.e. get 100,000,000. Then you know that to create interest, make a self-referring mass, etc, you can shorten the time by selling 10% of those at a 20% discount. In the end the actual discount (in the sense of reduced income) is 2% or 10% of 20%. When you use (as opposed to the limited quantity) a deadline such as 31st of January this starts to be "less sound", but on "real" items you can use it all the same, because you do know how many items will be on the market as you know how many of them you will produce and send to the shops by that time, so it is almost the same as setting a limit on the number of items. But here we have something a little bit different. The difference between the "introductory offer" and the "standard retail price" is not the "logical" 10%, 20% or even 30%. You are going to tell your customers (or potential ones), that they can have something (Windows 8 Pro upgrade) now for 39.99 but soon they will only be able to get it for 199.99. 1-(39.99/199.99)=0.80 or 80% discount. Then, you sell LESS THAN EXPECTED items at the heavily discounted price BUT keep the (senseless) deadline the same. This turns apparently in a saving (IF you can sell anyway enough of the stuff at the full price). Here we have something even worse, seemingly a part of the items you sold at the discounted price were acquired to be re-sold at the time the offer will end. I.e., besides the competition with other OS, you have managed to create an "internal" competition, allowing people to sell the same product but to a much lower price than the one you are selling (or wishing to sell) it at. Most probably it is just me.... jaclaz

Only 19 ? I have the same and the cheapest in Romania is 64 $. And US $44.99 on Newegg (with a five bucks discount): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139026&Tpk=corsair%20430 A typo 19 for 49? jaclaz

As said it may also depend on the exact way files are copied. If a "multithreaded" copy is initiated by the "cut and paste" or "copy and paste" (for whatever reason - possibly because of the large file size) it would be normal to have a fragmented file as a result. This would be "compatible" with the "same number of fragments" observed (a given file starts the same of number of copying threads and results in the same number of fragments ) I would rather try a copy or xcopy from command line. But still defragmenting the file with a file-oriented tool seems to me like the most straightforward solution. As an alternative you can try using a third party program, Ultradefrag: http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/en/index.html which provides more "control" or "granularity" on the defragmentation process. jaclaz

OT, but not much there is something everyone should be aware of (when imaging NTFS volumes/partitions as oppsed to "whole disks"). The backup bootsector of a NTFS partition is by definition "first sector outside the filesystem indexed sectors" AND "last sector in partition space". Not only it won't be backed up/saved when this is done by accessing the \\.\LogicalDriven (or the "drive letter") but ADDITIONALLY a number of sectors might be not present in the dd-like copy. In practice there can be "orphan sectors" that are inside the filesystem sector count but outside the filesystem cluster count. Since what is actually accessed are the clusters, many (almost *any*) program will skip these, with the result that the image will be a few (at the most <clustersize-1> sectors) smaller than the original, which is not normally a problem (as these sectors will anyway be 00's) but that can cause issues if you want to simply append to the image the backup bootsector (you need to insert the missing sectors). See this for the (gory ) details: jaclaz

Things should be done with some "order". First you find a suitable driver. Then you post info about it (as you were asked). Then, after having checked that it might do, we will talk about how to load it. Hints: You can use grub4dos to map a virtual floppy, see (examples): http://reboot.pro/topic/13967-install-windows-xp-from-iso-on-ufd-to-sata-hard-disk/ or you can integrate the driver in the source, see: (2K and XP are not that much different ) Possibly also of use: http://www.tim.id.au/blog/tims-f6-driver-guide/ jaclaz

That's normal. A poll is "updated" (and thus "bumped") every time a member votes on it (anonimously, i.e. without actually posting anything to the attached thread). jaclaz

There is not an answer. It greatly depends on a number of factors, including the specific way they were copied, the order on which this was done, the amount of free space on the volume and possibly some more. BUT it is not clear (to me) which steps you took. If you want to try again with moving back and forth the procedure is: move the files to another volume defrag the "original" volume (which has now more free space as you removed from it the files) move back the files from the "temporary volume" If you did not perform step #2 above this is likely the reason, a file becoming fragmented is not a "characteristic of the file" but a "characteristic of the filesystem where it is copied" (I hope I made myself clear). If the "original volume" has a fragemented file is normally because the continuity of the space is interrupted by other files, imagine you have something like: FF1F111F11FF wher F represents the fragmented file and 1 represents another allocated file (or a set of other allocated files). When you move the File, it will look something *like*: 001011101100 where 0 means non-allocated space. If you copy back the file now, it will fill the 0's and thus it will be fragmented "as before". If instead you run defrag now, the situation will be *like*: 111111000000 so that when you copy back the file you will get: 111111FFFFFF If you want a specific file (or a set of specific files) defragmented, you might want to use a file defragmenter, there are two commonly used (they work under XP not W9x): Contig (Command line): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx Wincontig (GUI and command line): http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/ jaclaz

If the NTFS partition was originally made under XP/2003 (or earlier) and it was first partition, it's CHS address would have been 0/1/1, LBA 63. If it was done under Vista or later, it's CHS address would 0/32/33, LBA 2048. I cannot say whether diskpart clean would affect the hidden sectors (which include sector 32). If - as I presume - you ran the diskpart clean from the BOOTED NT OS on first primary parttion, it is very likely that the $MFT corruption is: a. "marginal" b. "induced" by the effects of the diskpart clean command. The good news are that there is no way on earth that TESTDISK may have found a "wrong" partition start. The $MFT location is indexed in the bootsector as a relative offset to the volume start (LCN or Logical Cluster Number) so, if you had a "wrong" bootsector the $MFT would NOT have been found at all (i.e. you would see a RAW volume). Compare with this thread: The bad news are that in practice you have NO alternatives BUT running CHKDSK in "write" mode. What I would personally do would be: image the disk "as is" with a dd-like or "forensic sound" tool <- you will need a disk bigger that the original, formatted as NTFS preferably run CHKDSK /F (on the original disk's NTFS volume) run CHKDSK /R (on the original disk's NTFS volume) verify that everything is OK (and nothing is "missing") if anything is missing, use DMDE on the image to attempt recovering the "missing" Datarescuedd: http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm (under Linux you can use *any* dd-like program, BUT remember to also save the first 63 (hidden) sectors) DMDE: http://softdm.com/ jaclaz

Well, there isn't only the "MS WAIK only" way to build a PE. You can produce a PE 2.x or PE 3.x with other tools/builders, which normally run under XP. jaclaz

BUT the target drive will need to exist beforehand, i.e. the disk needs to be partitioned and formatted before, in order to have a drive that can be network connected. Again all the issues are in preparing the "base" and/or creating "first" clone, once done that everything is fine. jaclaz

Hmmm, I would rather troubleshoot and solve the issue at hand with AT rather than have IE6 SP1 in order to have Task Scheduler. There is not one reason in the world why plain AT should not work, AFAIK. There is more than one way to skin a cat, most of them without any need to have Internet Explorer on NT 4. In my (perverted) mind installing IE on NT4 and upgrading it to IE6 sounds like a complete failure at solving the problem and thus shooting a fly with a cannon. If the issue is not resolved "simply", I would rather try a third party tool such as (example) nircmd: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html jaclaz

As a side note, a possible replacement for pstart has been found/proposed by ericgl: available in both 32 and 64 bit. jaclaz

READ the given link. It is possible that there are access rights issue (IMHO the most likely, but cannot really say). It could be an issue when writing the temporary "out" file or when actually executing it through rundll32 setupapi. Do exactly the steps listed above, and report what happens/which step fails. At first sight there is nothing "wrong" in the batch, I would personally write it slightly differently: @ECHO OFF PUSHD %temp% set inf=InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall ::SET ::PAUSE ( echo [version] echo signature=$chicago$ echo [defaultinstall] )>{out}.inf :: TYPE {out}.inf ::PAUSE rundll32 setupapi,%inf% 1 %temp%\{out}.inf ::PAUSE del {out}.inf POPD but it shouldn't make a difference (to test remove the :: in front of the lines to pause and show what is happening). jaclaz P.S: : I am not too sure that grouping with brackets is supported in NT 4, if it doesn't work revert to plainer: echo [version]>{out}.inf echo signature=$chicago$>>{out}.inf echo [defaultinstall]>>{out}.inf

Well, NO. The MBR code is there allright, in several system files: http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/WTC.htm And "FIXMBR" will replace the CODE without touching the partition table entries (it won't "wipe" the MBR. only the code). So. it would "break" the compatibility with F11 recovery BUT NOT alter the "normal" booting: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.shtml This said, installing from an OEM disc to another hardware - besides connected legal issues - is not "easy" and not "for the faint of heart" or "newbie". The DELL install CD's. addditonally, tend to be "tricky" (to say the least). @epic The procedure that I personally recommend (though not particularly "fast") is to "re-generalize" the install CD. If you will be able to bear the pages and pages of "difficulties in communication", "side notes" and more generally the overall verbosity of this (seemingly unrelated) thread: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=24161&hl= it contains all you need to know (and do) up to the most detailed minutiae and even more. jaclaz jaclaz

@submix8 You missed the references I gave. http://www.williamaford.com/CloningaHDD.php Which, specifically, leads to here: http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy10.htm which provides the EXACT steps needed (if doing everything through XXCOPY) in the words of the Author of the tool himself. What I was additionally hinting is that by using first Partition Logic (or other suitable tool) to do a "dd-like" copy of the old hard disk to the new one, more than a few of the steps can be avoided, if you prefer all the difficulties are for "first run" or "first clone" of XXCOPY, once you have a suitable target you can: jaclaz

Post the contents of the actual .bat (which BTW should really be a .cmd) Here there are some good tips on what to add to the batch to troubleshoot/debug: http://www.robvanderwoude.com/ntat.php jaclaz

Well the actual point is that there are mainly two devices involved, the video card and the display. One of the two must be the culprit or concurring to the issue. In the case I cited, I could replace the monitor with an old CRT one I had around. In your case, it is *something* in the video card. (and yes, I remember vaguely something similar happening about the need of fully powering down a system between the two phases ) Idea! @tomasz86 Even if it's a laptop, why don't you try attaching an external monitor next time? jaclaz

Well, check the manual, look for numebrs on the actual thingy, you need to be sure rather than "thinking". For the mk4 the driver is seemingly: http://pc-dl.panasonic.co.jp/public/soft_first/cf-y_w_t_r_f_s_n8h_os/SATAFloppyConfigUtil_v8.9.0.1023_T8H_XP_ss6784.exe and the controller is "ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller" Now, be nice, find the "right" driver for XP on the panasonic site, and post information (like I did) for it, then someone may be able to help you find a corresponding win2K driver. http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/computer-support-search-downloads.asp jaclaz

So, all in all you need a "cloning app" but not necessarily a "forensic sound" one. And it needs to be able to run in Dos (and Win9x/Me). And it should be able to - periodically - synchronize the "clone" to the running system (otherwise you would soon find yourself with an "outdated" emergency solution. Basically, you are describing XXCOPY: http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm See: http://www.williamaford.com/CloningaHDD.php A nice thingy that you may also want to experiment with is Partition Logic: http://partitionlogic.org.uk/index.php it should run on *any* system: http://partitionlogic.org.uk/about/index.php with the exception of some SATA disks/contollers, which are not involved in your case. jaclaz

JFYI, this kind of things sometimes (not necessatily your case) may happen also on the "display" side. I have seen this happen (and also another "queer" effect such as NOT being able to see anything in the BIOS setup) with el-cheapo LCD's that are also (I shoudl say "mainly") TV's. In practice the issue is the video card - for any reason - sending signals with a resolution/frequency that the LCD - for any reason - doesn't "hook" correctly. jaclaz

I see. Then all you need is OSCDIMG: http://www.windowsvalley.com/create-windows-vista-and-windows-7-bootable-dvd/ You might need to extract the etfsboot.com from the DVD, and probably also bootfix.bin: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cesardelatorre/archive/2009/03/08/how-to-create-a-bootable-dvd-windows-7-or-windows-vista.aspx See also: jaclaz

I don't get it. The image posted on the right seems to show how a 3 Gb file is actually on the disc. It is possible that only the indexing records for it are actually written to the DVD (and this would be compatible with the disc shoeing no "written" area as it would probably be too small to be viewable). You can use a disk editor to inspect the device at sector level, personally I would first make a dd-like copy of it and inspect the image. One of these (or both) should do: http://www.dubaron.com/cd2iso/ http://dubaron.com/diskimage/ But if the disc is a DVD (not DVD RW), whatever the reason, it is hosed. I would rather risk "sacrifying" another DVD disc trying to burn it with a surely working burning program (IMGBURN): http://www.imgburn.com/ using ANOTHER "source" (as to be able to exclude actual hardware issues of the drive and verify that it is a possible source/burning app issue). You can also try DVDisaster on the disc that (as a "side" feature) should be able to show you graphically the written areas: http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html jaclaz

I am not sure to understand. Normally you have a DVD (or .iso) and you make FROM it a USB bootable stick. HOW did you make originally the USB stick? (starting from what?) The "bought online and downloadable" version X13-49120.exe or something similar? Making a DVD is however not particularly difficult (but as said it depends on the Source you have), probably the easiest would be using vlite: http://www.genghiskhent.com/articles/vlitesp1.html jaclaz