jaclaz

I'd expect (presuming Microsoft was telling the truth) that I'd still be using Windows 8 x128 by 2038. Only because the "idea" of having a PC with an exabyte of RAM is such a mind-boggling yet fascinating idea. And to add in the fact that it would likely take me 25 years to save up enough money to buy that much RAM... Or at least a motherboard with 1 billion RAM slots on it. Well, let's see what could happen in 27 years applying Moore Law and/or one of the similar related ones : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law http://users.hal-pc.org/~slcweb2/0MonthlyPresent/0403MooreLaw/0MooreLaw.html BUT take into account also Wirht's Law : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law And Jevons' Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Basically you will need to run a small nuclear plant to get the power needed for the PC on which you will write lousy posts on MSFN or the occasional e-.mail to your grand grandsons. jaclaz

WHY? You should as said check WHICH one will become CurrentControlSet and change ONLY that one (or use the given alternate app that will allow you to use the CurrentControlSet and resolve internally/automatically the addressing to the right ControlSetxyz) The whole idea of having two ControlSets is to have one that is (supposedly) failsafe. If by mistake you "botch" BOTH sets, you will have quite a bit of problems in fixing the issue you provoked yourself (i.e. otherwise a non-issue) jaclaz

You probably misunderstood. I know that in year 2038 - if still alive - I will most probably be still using 2K (or in the worst case XP). I was asking about you. And @Tripredacus , most probably we will be using Qemu 217.2 on an Ubuntu 408.25 "Wild Worry-free Wooing Wombat" with kernel 118.4.10 in order to run it on the AMINTEL i4886 1024bit processor. And of course should not skynet gain self-awareness in the meantime. jaclaz

CurrentControlSet does NOT actually "exist". When the Registry is ONLINE a LINK is made to EITHER of ControlSet001 or ControlSet002 (normally, but there may be many more ControlSets) depending on contents of the Select (Current) key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Select You can also use this app: http://reboot.pro/11212/ http://reboot.pro/11312/ that automatically does the "detection". jaclaz

Well, in the next 27 years this should become clear enough. But are you sure that in 2038 you will use a NTFS filesystem and/or a NT based system released some 30 years before? (Please raise your hand you peeps that run on a daily basis a CP/M machine.) The issue is known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem it mainly affects Unix based OS (and conversely POSIX times) There are a couple places dedicated to this issue: http://www.deepsky.com/~merovech/2038.html http://www.codeproject.com/KB/bugs/The-Year-2038-Bug.aspx http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/y2k/yrexamples.html In non-critical apps/OS/systems, in 2038 we will be able to use SETBACK approach: http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/y2k/yrexamples.html#_OtherBad.WorkAround And "proper" NT is immune: http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/y2k/yrexamples.html#_Native.Microsoft.Epochs 1601 Microsoft NT/2000 (Win32) n/a 100nsec ticks since 1601-January-01 for a range of about 29,200 years until roughly year 30,800 http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/y2k/yrexamples.html#_Native.Microsoft.Ticks though "bad" programs may still behave "wrongly". jaclaz

WinsetupfromUSB is NOT "the ultimate solution to all of your problems". You have a specific problem (outside the scope of WinsetrupfromUSB) with a specific .iso. If you prefer WinSetupfromUSB provides an easy opton to add .iso's ALREADY KNOWN to be working with "default" or "standard" grub4dos )0xFF) or (hd32) mapping. It is not aimed to become the "ultimate multi-boot solution on USB sticks". READ (to get the idea of the issues that may be involved): http://reboot.pro/8944/ http://reboot.pro/5041/ Then: http://reboot.pro/14178/ http://reboot.pro/9570/ If you *need* grub4dos booting the HPStartSmart .iso start a new thread here: http://reboot.pro/forum/66/ It may be possible or it may be not, as per above. There is a report about version 8.3: http://reboot.pro/7868/ but cannot say if it will work with your version (and/or if the report was accurate) jaclaz

....and make it longer than 12 characters and make sure you insert "strange" non alpha-numeric characters and not a-z/A-Z ones. Examples: h1_1_@m_@_|33t_p@§§vv0rd ÿ00_vv0n*t_cr@ç#-m3 BTW, IcemanND's nice batch may be "bettered" (assuming you are on a 2K/XP or later NT based system): @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL ENABLEEXTENSIONS IF NOT "%1"=="" FOR /F %%A in ('type %~nx0 ^|FIND ":%1" ^| FIND /V "FIND"') DO GOTO :%1 Echo A suffusion of yellow ... GOTO :EOF :sorry Echo Sorry! GOTO :EOF :welcome echo welcome OR (to follow your original post): @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL ENABLEEXTENSIONS IF NOT "%1"=="" FOR /F %%A in ('type %~nx0 ^|FIND ":%1" ^| FIND /V "FIND"') DO GOTO :%1 Echo Sorry! GOTO :EOF :welcome echo welcome OR: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL IF /I "%1"=="welcome" GOTO :%1 Echo Sorry! GOTO :EOF :welcome echo welcome jaclaz

Sure it's fine. BUT the scope of the exercise is NOT to clone a disk, it is to IMAGE it. So we need more space than source to allow for the "host" filesystem (which will necessarily be NTFS) structures (and have some slack space to concatenate partial image chunks if such an approach is needed). Since NTFS normally dedicates 12.5% space for it's structures: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm 500x1.125=562.5 represents the bare minimum, and 640 Gb is the next near "common size", allowing to manage one excess 50 Gb chunk, like in 562.5+50=612.5<640 (but normally on a modern system one has at least a couple of such 50 Gb "slots" free on some other disk, so we have enough space to manage "issues", should that arise) A 750 GB is "better" and a 1 Tb is even better for imaging a 500 Gb. Just for your interest, as long as there is not a geometry conflict (quite rare if not impossible today, as *all* disks use a 255/63 geometry) it is a perrfectly normal and possible to clone a disk to a bigger one, what you read was probably the atttempts of dozens of people that had no idea WHAT they were doing or were adviced by the same peeps that suggested saman0suke updating the firmware or putting the disk in the freezer. There *may* be issues when using one of those "newish" 4 Kb sector HD's, but I have not yet needed to do a "clone to bigger" on one of those. jaclaz

I would rewrite your above sentence as following: This way it should become clear to you what the issue most probably is. OEM's in some cases modify the actual XP install CD to adapt (or target specifically) to a given hardware they produce. Such XP install discs may NOT be anymore "generic" and won't be able (without further modification/fixes) to install on anything but the original hardware. BTW, the essence of an OEM license is that it accompanies the hardware and is licensed to be used EXCLUSIVELY on that hardware. jaclaz

A coin flip is anything that will give you (on average) 50% (or very near to 50 %) of probabilities: http://www.facade.com/coin_flip/ http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/the-coin-flip-a-fundamentally-unfair-proposition S.M.A.R.T. or SMART: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. Play on words on normal meaning: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/smart http://www.synonyms.net/synonym/dumb See also : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism jaclaz

There is NONE (actually none that has ANY kind of reliability). The only meaningful data we have is from a (now getting a bit dated) google paper: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf that proved beyond any possible doubt that the only tool you have, which is the S.M.A.R.T. technology (one that I personally call "D.U.M.B."), is substantially m00t and has NO actual capability of forecasting a drive failure reliably. The only things you can do are: keep them drives as cool as possible (this is the MAIN thing) power them with a "good" power supply unit reduce as much as you can the number of power on / power off cycles do a CHKDSK periodically (say once every month or so) after the CHKDSK, check SMART data , if Realloc counters have grown sensibly, change the disk drive, every nine months or so, flip a coin, if it's head, replace the drive, if it's tails, keep it until next coin flip (please note that on average and on a sufficiently big number of drives this approach will not produce results substantially different from a dedicated hardware parameters monitoring program and/or SMART based prediction) SMART readings are "mostly useless" in the sense that whilst a drive that starts increasing some of the few meaningful SMART parameters should be replaced as soon as possible (INDEPENDENTLY from the result of the coin flip), the amount of drives "simply failing" without any SMART error in advance is so big that the coin flip is a good enough approximation. There is no actual difference in the different tools/utilities, to write a given number of bytes the drive spin motor needs to do a given number of turns and the set of heads needs to travel back and forth a given amount of time. The only thing is of course whether your copying strategies do provoke a heating in the disk drive (intensive disk activity, like as an examle cloning a drive as RAW may increase slightly the temperature), but since you have a good cooling solution for them (#1 above: keep 'em cool) this is UNlikely to change anything. jaclaz

Naah, unless you freeze it, or shake it too much there is no chance that the "new" hard drive will ever be damaged in the procedures. The worst case is that your currently inaccessible hard disk will remain inaccessible, or if you prefer not any real worse situation than the one you are currenlty in, only you will have spent a few bucks for the "new" drive and actually "have" a "new" drive, entropy should not be much increased by this. jaclaz

I seem (vaguely) to remember that on first EVER execution of a WMI (or WMIC) query/command on a system the WBEM (whatever it is) is *somehow* "initialized". Maybe this is the case. http://ss64.com/nt/wmic.html Or maybe it is an Administrator/UAC/permission issue? Anyway, now that it works, run it like this: wmic path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration get /format:csv>C:\test\test.csv and open/import the resulting .csv file in *any* spreadsheet program. This way you will see easily all the info that is coming from the command and see which conditions you can use in the query and which fields are to be retrieved. Generic query syntax is: wmic path <wmi path> where <condition> get <comma separated fields you want to retrieve> jaclaz

Well, the freezer trick (if done properly) should NOT make things worse (or MUCH worse ). It simply WON'T do ANYTHING. It is mostly a myth, though it can work in a very limited amount of cases, it is NOT something that you should normally even THINK to do. But it is pretty much harmless. If there is a "botched" hard drive a NT system (that actually by default tries automatically to access/mount it) will be always slower/more sluggish when loading. This is also "normal". Together with the freezer trick there are various version of the other myth (that again as always happens does have some true basis) more generically (i.e. not necessarily related to hard disks) it goes under the name of "percussive maintenance": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussive_maintenance http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Percussive%20Maintenance I have not a Maxtor or Seagate drive of a similar type handy, and even if I had it I won't "shake" it to see if it does have something loose inside, but it is very possible that the head moves when the disk drive is shaken in a given direction, but please STOP shaking that poor disk anyway. If you have an exactly the same size disk (500 Gb tend to have the same exact size): http://www.forensicfocus.com/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7552 you may want to try a "direct" (disk-to-disk) dd-like image, but cannot say which kind of issues may arise if you actually find a "really bad" bunch of "bad sectors" if this is the case a recommended app is this one: http://alter.org.ua/en/soft/win/bb_recover/ (still cannot say about it's functionality under 7) but since you probably can use a 640 Gb disk anyway and I presume that you value your (currently lost) data more that the difference between the cost of a brand new 640 Gb and the money you can get by selling it as used if it comes out as a non-feasible recovery, it's a bet that if I were you I would take. @allen2 Just for the record jaclaz does not use any particular "magic" , only a set of tools used in a proper manner. along the lines of proper procedures The nearest thing to "magic" that jaclaz happens to touch is his crystal ball, the one that is perennial foggy or out of tune and that he uses when torture fails to get proper info from people. jaclaz

Seagate peeps are very often in denial mode. http://www.essortment.com/5-stages-grief-16816.html It is also possible that the CAUSE of your problem was not the "usual" firmware problem but *something else* that by pure chance the "general reset" that this procedure implements healed. This is the idea of last sentence in point #1 of read-me-first: Set apart the original firmware issue it is evident by the number of posts from people that have "not affected" firmware, that the BSY or LBA0 situation may happen for a number of different causes, and seemingly this procedure fixes a number of these cases of "unwanted effects" even if the cause is not the same. jaclaz

Then there is no reason why it shouldn't work. Each and every keyword: corresponds to an available "format", i.e. a valid parameter of the /format:<keyword>. Can you try with some other of the keywords? Example of my output with RAWXML: C:\test>wmic path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration where "IPENABLED=TRUE" get Caption,SettingID /format:rawxml <COMMAND SEQUENCENUM="1" ISSUEDFROM="CINQUE" STARTTIME="08-30-2011T16:44:44" EVE RYCOUNT="0"><REQUEST><COMMANDLINE> path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration where "IPENABLED=TRUE" get Caption,SettingID /format:rawxml</COMMANDLINE> <COMMANDLINECOMPONENTS><NODELIST><NODE>CINQUE</NODE> </NODELIST> </COMMANDLINECOMPONENTS> <CONTEXT><NAMESPACE>root\cimv2</NAMESPACE> <ROLE>root\cli</ROLE> <IMPLEVEL>IMPERSONATE</IMPLEVEL> <AUTHLEVEL>PKTPRIVACY</AUTHLEVEL> <LOCALE>ms_410</LOCALE> <PRIVILEGES>ENABLE</PRIVILEGES> <TRACE>OFF</TRACE> <RECORD>N/A</RECORD> <INTERACTIVE>OFF</INTERACTIVE> <FAILFAST>OFF</FAILFAST> <OUTPUT>STDOUT</OUTPUT> <APPEND>STDOUT</APPEND> <USER>N/A</USER> <AGGREGATE>ON</AGGREGATE> </CONTEXT> </REQUEST> <RESULTS NODE="CINQUE"><CIM><INSTANCE CLASSNAME="Win32_NetworkAdapterConfigurati on"><PROPERTY NAME="Caption" TYPE="string"><VALUE>[00000008] Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Controller</VALUE> </PROPERTY> <PROPERTY NAME="SettingID" TYPE="string"><VALUE>{4E1252DC-1884-4B8E-BFF4-B016E79 0CCF4}</VALUE> </PROPERTY> </INSTANCE> </CIM> </RESULTS> </COMMAND> I have no idea why the CSV option is not working for you. Try checking contents of file %WINDIR%\system32\wbem\xsl-mappings.xml (if any): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc778755(WS.10).aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc784974(WS.10).aspx And if you have a %WINDIR%\system32\wbem\csv.xsl file. And if you have %WINDIR%\system32\wbem\ in path. (or try navigating to %WINDIR%\system32\wbem\ and run WMIC in it) jaclaz

You need a hex editor to do that (or a hex file comparing utility). I normally use Tiny Hexer. Simplest of binary (and text) file compare program is obviously FC (/B): http://ss64.com/nt/fc.html jaclaz

The /format: switch changes the format of the output. Examples: http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/07/wmic-custom-alias-and-format.html It seems like something has changed in Windows 7, but cannt say what, if either syntax dod not worlk for you. As an example what I get on my machine with: is: and with: wmic path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration where "IPENABLED=TRUE" get Caption,SettingID /format:csv I get: (i.e. an easy parsable CSV) What do you get if you issue: http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=1229 wmic process list /format /? You should get a number of "keywords". jaclaz

I see now , you are running 7. WMIC (at least on XP) allows for /format:csv . It has changed on 7, (cannot say why): http://xinn.org/misc-scripts/wmic.txt Try: jaclaz

Well, you stated it was NOT lazyness, I was simply trying to find a rational explanation and no, the "Anything that has anything to do with coding (this is coding in a way) is simply beyong what I can understand." is not valid. You have probably a typo, then. Try copy/paste. Try the simpler: wmic path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration then: wmic path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration where "IPENABLED=TRUE" get Caption,SettingID And finally again: wmic path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration where "IPENABLED=TRUE" get Caption,SettingID /format:csv jaclaz

It seems to me what you asked originally Most probably there was an initial misunderstanding. Hmmmm. It seems like you have a common path: It shouldn't be that difficult to: jaclaz

Then you had an empty MBR (no code) provided that my crystal ball is accurate in seeing HOW you did run MBRFIX. BTW you don't need a RAID driver to acces a single sector AFAIK. jaclaz

Translated, you are ASSUMING that there is a file where this info is hard-coded (right assumption ) AND that you can change it (wrong one ). Now, the good news are that I lied to you It is possible (on a particular version of BOOTMGR): http://reboot.pro/8043/ which evolved into: http://sites.google.com/site/rmprepusb/tutorials/how-to-create-a-usb-drive-that-will-install-vista-win7-and-server-2008 BUT there are better ways : http://sites.google.com/site/rmprepusb/tutorials/firawiniso You will need to mix (and shake well ) one of the two above (preferrably the second) with this: https://sites.google.com/site/rmprepusb/tutorials/pxe It should work. jaclaz

The flashing boot cursor is traditionally linked to: non-balance between CHS and LBA in the partition table "wrong" geometry in the bootsector BPB I doubt the first can be the cause, so I would go for the second. Try nopping the checks for geometry in the bootsector code. See here: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=21702&st=129 http://reboot.pro/8528/page__st__21 Alternatively, can you boot off a grub4dos (on CD/USB/floppy whatever)? jaclaz

If you can see the partitions, your drive DOES NOT suffer from either of LBA0 or BSY and you do not consequently need Victoria to check for BSY state. You are affected by an "easier" kind of problem (partition data corruption) which needs a different set of tools/approach. (mind you the fact that the problem is "easier" does not mean that it can *always* be solved or that it can be solved *easily* or solved at 100%). Now, the "right path" is: image the drive (you will need for this a larger one, surely working and teested, ideal it would be a 640 Gb one) the "standard procedure" is to image the failed drive TWICE, but I do understand that there may be cost problems involved in having two such hard disks, but at least one image is IMNSHO the bare minimum. to image the drive, since we don't know it's "hardware state" I would suggest you to use DatarescueDD: http://reboot.pro/7783/ using the procedure outlined here (if there are probelms in imaging in one single go): http://reboot.pro/15040/page__st__8 once we have an image, we can start working on it the general idea is to first thing try and recover (if possible) the partitions (and restore them to functional filesystems) if the above does not work, we will try a file based recovery approach (the type and amount of UNreplaceable data that was on the disk will come into play should this approach be needed) the general idea of recovering a partition can be get by reading this thread here: Mind you we can attempt the recovery even on the actual currently "botched" disk, but it is NOT recommended as there are possibilities that the result will be a further complexity (or impossibility ) of recovering the data. There should be no problems in running the tools on a 32 bit Windows 7, but you will probably need UAC turned off Having an XP (32 bit) machine would be better, if available. jaclaz