jaclaz

Sure, it uses graphic card CPU (which is seemingly faster). If you have not a machine with one of the supported cards it won't probably work fast enough, but it should work allright. Possibly you have some issues with the syntax? jaclaz

NCQ makes a huge difference in real life. When booting W2k (whose disk access isn't as optimized as by Xp with its prefetch) it means for instance 18s instead of 30s, so Ahci should always be used, even if it requires an F6 diskette. Different disks have different Ncq firmware resulting in seriously different experienced performance, and this cannot be told in advance from the disks' datasheet, nor from benchmarks of access time and contiguous throughput. Anyway, the arm positioning time between near tracks should be more important than random access over the whole disks, which usage never requires. Few benchmarks make a sensible measurement here. Ncq is meaningful only if a request queue is used, but for instance Atto isn't very relevant here; it seems to request nearly-contiguous accesses, which give unrealistic high performance and show little difference between Ncq strategies; nice tool however to observe quickly if a volume is aligned on a Flash medium. The reference here is IOMeter but it's not easy to use, especially for access alignment. Recent CrystalDiskMark tests with Q=32 which is far too much for a workstation (Q=2 to 4). Really? Guess why I had previously posted this? and why I asked the qiestion in the form: jaclaz

It depends. For a semi-automated attempt, TESTDISK. For manual recovery I tend to use Tiny Hexer (with my small viewers/templates for it). A very good app in my view is dmde (though very powerful, more handy for filesystem recovery) BUT read this: (and links within it) Well, the general idea is to STOP fiddling with a disk as soon as you find an issue . In Windows XP "way of thinking", since everything is Cylinder boundary related, only steps of around 8 Mb are "sensed" by the Disk manager (1x255x63=16065x512=8225280). Cannot say about 7, but most probably it has similar issues but with the same "pre-sets" that affect diskpart and that can be overridden through the Registry: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=21186 http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=21186&st=18 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931760/en-us The 1 Mb (which i s not a "measure", bytes are units, Megabytes or Mibibytes or whatever can be displayed in several different way by different utilities using different conventions) could be "normal", the 2 Mb less so A typical Vista or 7 first partition is aligned to 1 Mb (2048 sectors), but there may be variations, it is possible that - for any reason - the gap you found around 1 Mb in size is aactually smaller than 1 Mb (and thus results in "a suffusion of yellow") and that the other around 2 Mb gap is not a myltiple of 1 Mb and thus is ignored. Cannot say. Here is an example of a partition recovery (to give you an idea of the kind of approach): and another one: jaclaz

Yep, that is seemingly "by design" (as the good MS guys would put it) . Sorry for your mishap, but you are not the first one: http://reboot.pro/9897/ AND you were been already warned about the issue: BTW the data is normally perfectly recoverable, that is if you use properly a data recovery app that GPARTED is not AFAIK. jaclaz

Only this one free AFAIK: http://www.crark.net/ Years ago I used this successfully: http://www.elcomsoft.com/archpr.html BUT, as evidenced on first link, simply FORGET about recovering a password with brute force unless you can restrict the range considerably (i.e. you know *something* about the actual password), or may be only your great-greatsons will be able to get to the cntents of the archive jaclaz

Semi-random thought - as always Which role (if any) would NCQ (Native Command Queuing) have in the benchmark(s)? jaclaz

It doesn't seem to difficult to me. Have you followed "to the T" the instructions by Steve6375? That is a yes or a no (no other answer is allowed). If you reply "no", then you are on your own . As I see it, in order to "go ahead" we need a starting point: get a NON SP1 source and try replicating EXACTLY the tutorial by Steve6375, if you succeed, you can later introduce a variation, if it doesn't then we must find where exactly *somehow* you deviated from the tutorial. jaclaz

Sure, that's EXACTLY the kind of situation where Murphy's Law - that normally hides in the dark - simply loves to come out in the open and prove itself - once again - dramatically true: in this particular case also a lesser known extension woud apply : jaclaz

NO prob whatever . As already said: I won't get involved in a flame war about MSCDEX.EXE vs. SHSUCDX.EXE or mkisofs vs magiciso or whatever, they all seem to me like King Kong vs. Godzilla (and JFYI, the dinosaur can get rid of that grown up chimpanzee with one hand tied behind his back, anytime ) You want MSCDEX.EXE, have it, it's all yours. Just for the record, you forgot a "yet" in your sentence : jaclaz

Well, but - to be fair - in exchange for that Mouse Ballistics was applied , and all the gamers were (and still are) very happy about this : To sum up: Windows 2000 was a bettered NT 4.0, actually better. Windows XP was a very slightly bettered Windows 2000 with a toyish interface and with a number of senseles features added. Vista was a bettered XP, only worse. 7 was a bettered Vista , actually slightly better with an increasingly toyish interface 8 is a quantum leap , it is directly a toy jaclaz

Or because a number of businesses refused to upgrade their Office 2000 (that was working) to the XP one (2002) which was severely buggy, and to 2003 (which offered NOT *any * real advantage) and thanks to the needless use by most demented people of the senseless .docx and .xlsx "new" formats were eventually "forced" to "jump" from good ol' 2000 to 2007 or 2010? BTW only to find besides the REALLY slowing up work ribbon interface, also a few nice features REMOVED? Something I just found out the other day: If you read attentively the source (highlighted the interesting parts): http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2009/11/02/excel-add-in-for-manipulating-points-on-charts-mpoc.aspx it can be used to infer that: Since the reaction time of the MS office team (which - with all due respect - has as focus a much simpler target than a "whole" Windows OS and the actual "issue" is so simple that can be solved by an add-in, a bit simpler that changing the whole GUI interface) is not snappy enough to react in over two years, then, even if the good MS guys would listen to actual user feedback, you can expect a "fixed" Windows 8 GUI by 2015 . jaclaz

OR do "the right thing" and use SHSUCDX, instead . http://adoxa.3eeweb.com/ http://adoxa.3eeweb.com/shsucdx/index.html Seriously, MSCDEX cannot possibly recognize and access a number of CD's, simply because some of the .iso extensions were made AFTER the MSCDEX was released. About USB, your best choice is to try this floppy here: http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/usbdrv.html strangely down , via Wayback Machine : http://web.archive.org/web/20100127181929/http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/usbdrv.html http://web.archive.org/web/20100127181929/http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/usbdrv.html jaclaz

They also filed new ones. Example: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-patent-lcd-screen-hygiene,13783.html maybe they are going to (swiftly) move from software to "Tablet screen sanitizers" We do have some similar examples in the past (please read as "in the future" ): http://collateraldamage.wordpress.com/2006/05/02/douglas-adams-right-again-lack-of-phone-sanitizers-will-doom-planet/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters#Telephone_Sanitizer And even an interesting start-up: http://shop.cleanergear.com/ I cannot but find a few similarities between the instructions here: http://cleanergear.com/support And the famous toohpick ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters#Wonko_the_Sane Humanity is doomed ..... jaclaz

Very good. I would presume that when you use 1.5 Gb instead of 600 Mb of disk space, there must be *something* added to an OS. 1500/600=2.5 I am glad to know that - contrary to my previous beliefs - EVERY single Mb of the 900 Mb more are worth it, and that every added feature, including Autoplay is actually an improvement. And of course all the work by Nuhi and fdv is perfectly pointless . Of course I a do not approve of many things (not in the article by itself, but in viewing it as "Windows XP is better than 2K" advertising for it) but notwithstanding the "opinions", the article looks like very accurately written and exhaustive . jaclaz

You don't REALLY want me to tell you. http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?s=&showtopic=16534&view=findpost&p=125036 Easy, logical explanation : jaclaz

Yep, that is a view of LBA sector 202213012. This is going to be a loong thread (and it does not belong here, this is becoming "generic data recovery" and NOT 7200.11 specific), please start a new thread for it. Basically *any* software tries to interpret "RAW" data (which is stored in the HD sectors). If even a teeny-tiny byte is "wrong" some software may be unable to interpret the data (just as an example removing/altering the 55AA Magic Bytes makes from the MBR *any* Windows built-in tool to fail interpreting a whole disk). Recovery software tries to detect the sectors or bytes missing/altered/whatever and tries to correct them and/or hints you about where to manually correct them. Most recovery software is aimed to "basic disks" and not to "dynamic disks" (thus they can find "nothing inside"). You need a dedicated tool AND a more than basic knowledge of the layout. From the screenshot it seems like DMDE finds that partition allright, but you need to study and learn BOTH about how a Dynamic disk is made AND about the specific tool usage, we are well beyond the "click-here-and-I-will-automagically-recover-all-files-approach" a number of "end user" recovery tools tend to adopt. jaclaz

Since it has already been (senselssly) bumped, it should mean that somehow this thread is "easily visible" through a search engine or Board Search feature. So, it may be of interest to post some related news: httpdisk: http://reboot.pro/13049/ Getwaiktools: jaclaz

With *any* hex/disk editor. The one I normally use and suggest is Tiny Hexer: http://reboot.pro/8734/ Another very good tool (though not strictly a hex/disk editor) is dmde (which is IMHO an exceptionally good "advanced" recovery software): http://softdm.com/ It does have "sector level" access: http://softdm.com/manual/diskeditor.html jaclaz

For NO apparent reason , and possibly of NO use whatever , a simple spreadsheet with common display resolutions and screen sizes (and consequent physical density in dpi). jaclaz Screens_dpi.zip

No . Meaning that at the "level" it is very unlikely that the disk firmware knows anything about "partitions" (as defined in the partition table in the MBR). I suspect that the "User partition" message you saw on the screen is not related to a partition like you are used to (software partition). To the disk firmware there are two partitions, Firmware partition and User partition, or, if you prefer, "Reserved Area" and "User accessible area". The partitions you make via software are inside the "User accessible area" or "User partition". I wouldn't give any relevance to the message (in the sense that it seem to me like UNrelated to the actual issue). Dynamic partitions are "tricky" . There are several ways how the user may have made them : simple volumes spanned volumes striped volumes mirrored volumes RAID-5 volumes once set aside simple volumes (and probably the first partition you found is of such a type) and mirrored volumes, all the other types are VERY complex to recover and very few softwares can deal with them properly. A tool known to be able to deal with those is File Scavenger (Commercial): http://www.quetek.com/RAID.htm Are actual sectors blank (00 filled)? If yes, there is nothing you can do . If no, there are maybe some possibilities . jaclaz

A possible explanation could be an attempt to reach another "Ballmer peak": http://xkcd.com/323/ and fail at it (again) . I presume it will pass to history as the "Sinofsky plunge" jaclaz

And there is not even a picture! here: jaclaz

I would gladly tell you, but the board word filters wouldn't allow it.... jaclaz

Naah, it doesn't work this way, you cannot write that someone is an id***, but you can allright say that he/she has taken idiotical decisions.... jaclaz

With all due respect , a rather pointless experiment. The idea is (was) to "clone" a drive where a bootable Win 9x OS was residing to another drive and have this latter boot that OS "as before". Copying a bunch of files to a ramdisk is - even if sudccessful - only a subset of the needed chores. As said, a lot of time have passed, so I cannot remember the details, but at the time the XCOPY approach already posted was used because no third party tools were needed and because the simple COPY did not work, AFAICR. jaclaz