jaclaz

Yes/no. As I see it it is out of "current scope". All that seems to me like something that may be "post-processed". (and consequently to be tackled later, ONCE we have "basic" functionalities working). Current scope (as I see it) is to "consolidate" and "merge" whatever is in the "source" files into a "monolithic" file with NO CHANGES to the contents WHATSOEVER (apart removing crazy blank spaces and [TAB]'s). jaclaz

Experiment #1 for today : get mkdosfs: http://www1.mager.org/mkdosfs/ http://www1.mager.org/mkdosfs/mkdosfs.zip get dsfok: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/ http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/dsfok.zip get the attached file (usual half-@§§ed batch ) expand everything in a directory run the batch (FAT12build.cmd) Experiment #2 : Try using this app instead of Free Iso Creator: http://www.nbxsoft.com/ Free Create-Burn ISO http://www.nbxsoft.com/files/createburniso.exe It should avaoid patching the 0x02 to 0x03 jaclaz FAT12build.zip

No, the idea behind the two little apps is: no command line parameteres, simply do what is supposed to do. jaclaz

As I see it, right now the issue is to understand which bootsector CODE works with the sfloppy approach and which don't (and if they can tweaked to work). As briefly mentioned in the .xls, the MS-DOS 7.x boot code works, the FreeDOS and the grub4dos one do not (but I did just a quick test, that ened to be repeated/reproduced ). @dencorso generally speaking editing .iso's is not the best idea in the world, I have seen more trouble coming form doing that than almost anything else, the "right way" is to rebuild the .iso, IMHO. jaclaz

Well, no. That's called "I have something that is not currently available, for free or for $. Additionally, WHEN and IF it will be available, it will be "Closed-Source"." Corollary: "I won't also not reveal that I have this thing ready in the closet, unless someone will torture me" Sure, it is something that is done once one has decided to market something, in order to forecast revenues, if they are calculated to be too low, the item is not marketed after all. Of course you are perfectly free to release (or NOT release) anything as well as market (or avoid marketing) any of your tools, that's the very good thing about freedom . But you have to see it from a purely pragmatical viewpoint. Real, physical things produced have usually 5 main source for costs: development costs marketing/advertising costs production costs distribution costs product support costs When you talk about "immaterial" things like software item #3 is 0, item #4 is near to 0 (electronic dowmload) and #5 should be near to 0 as well (if the product is good ). So you have only two items: development costs marketing/advertising costs of which you ALREADY sustained the biggest item #1, so every cent you can get from the product is better than nothing. Pre-marketing surveys may be useful to target the retail price and to validate the usefulness of an advertising campaign, for which till now you had no costs. @dencorso You mean you doubted about it? You deserve to go behind the green glass door as "leery, but heedful peep "! jaclaz

I have used in the past one of the "bidirectional-type", which have a different "shape", like these: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=RXD639-IDE-SATA-ADP&cpc=SCH it was just for "emergency", but it did work with 80-pin cables and "acceptable" speed (didn't measure it, at the time, but I would have noticed an ATA-33 speed). Cannot really say which chip it was based. BTW, and OT, IMHO a little lead in an adapter: is UNlikely to provoke *anything* , after all the human race did not became extinct notwithstanding saturnism (which needs quite a bigger amount of lead to be absorbed): http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/saturnism @dencorso the spif223a is rated as being capable of haveing full ATA speed: http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=372 http://www.sunplusit.com/english/products/storage/SPIF223A.aspx uploadpdf.ic37.com/2009-2-25/SPIF223A_www.ic37.com.pdf jaclaz

Yes/no. What you are saying is mostly about re-formatting a 720 kb floppy. And yes, XP does attempt reading the existing info on the floppy. JFYI : http://www.winimage.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3117 and yes, NOT "news" : It is perfectly possible to format also a "bulk" floppy as 720 K: OT, but still FYI, besides FORMAT144 we also have FORMAT720: http://www.denispetrov.com/?page_id=3 jaclaz

@rloew Yes, it is very possible, I am usually very accurate and punctilious . Sure they are the headers from the Menuet Os guys, in their own words: http://www.menuetos.net/cdboot.htm more generally I defined myself the approach as half-@§§ed (actually 2/4-@§§ed) exactly to save other people the need of coming out saying: You share some common trait with one of the greatest geniuses in the whole history of mathematics, Pierre de Fermat : @dencorso Experiment for the day : populate your image with MSDOS 7.1 files+whatever else you might want to test use this app: http://www.minidvdsoft.com/isocreator/ to create a bootable .iso with it (+ any files you want in the "accessible CD" part) hexedit in the .iso AA5555AA8802 to AA5555AA8803 try booting the .iso in Qemu or whatever Vm you use jaclaz

Nice find! Possibly an evolution of these thingies here: http://reboot.pro/3537/ http://reboot.pro/3791/ Here lies the problem, there is no "we" , personally I ALREADY won, since more than ten years, as well as - I am told - several satisfied Win2K users, you seem like the only one having these problems (or considering the whatever you have as problems or refusing to follow simple troubleshooting steps or insisting in attributing these problems, whatever they are, to strange conspiracies). You are probably trying to do all together something that you never did, with a non-standard setup, adding to it each and every possible kind of things that may cause the problems. The fact that you come not (like most satisfied Win2K users) from a NT 4.0 background may play a part in some of the issues you describe, though, expecially those related to Admin or "plain user" authorizations and privileges. I was trying, in an as nice as possible way , to send the message that there is a non-trivial amount of probabilities that you managed to create a somehow "botched" install, by either implementing "queer" settings or installing "bad" apps. Keep also in mind that there is very little need, with a decently sized system partition and for a single user, to have the system partition NTFS formatted, Once again, my personal advice: describe your hard disk partitioning/settings AND the actual hardware you are using FORGET about ANY app just make a new, plain, simple, "naked", install of 2K, DO NOT install ANY other software try - next time - to just answer the questions other members may ask (they are intended to better understand the situation/problems and to try and help you) try - still next time - to just follow the advice other (more experienced with 2K) members may give you, once they will understand thanks to the above, WHAT the problem may be report what happens after following the above advice (and doing nothing else) jaclaz P.S.: On the new, "naked" install try following this: http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm the 1.5x value may be nonsense (depending on the amount of RAM you have) Just in case: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255205/en-us

Corollary: Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't. Truism or tautology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric) jaclaz

And how did you create the .iso (or CD)? @rloew You need a sturdier desk! (or a self-standing "for sale" sign ) @all Find attached an early, as usual half- @§§ed (in this particular case 3/4 ) approach . Credits go to rloew and to the good guys at MenuetOS : http://www.menuetos.net/cdboot.htm jaclaz sfloppyCD_01.zip

I give up, I can see when it is of no use. From the amount of troubles you describe I must have been lucky (and have been so for the last 11 years) since I never experienced any of the problems you seem like having. BTW on most machines I ever ran and on actual machines that I do still run 2K on, I use OpenOffice also. jaclaz

Strangely enough, the idea is not really-really new http://bootcd.narod.ru/images_e.htm (though in those cases the .rar was inside the .zip, and you made it the other way round ) I won't even try , at least for the moment , I mean, let's go in steps, I would be happy enough to have it work with a 3840 Kb or 5760 Kb one jaclaz

Or a "real-real" one, like Ultradefrag.... http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/ Try checking the "status" column in it's report. jaclaz

Who knows? My remark was more a "generic" one, you have something in your closet, you may be willing to sell it, but until you don't take it out of the closet and put it on display on your desk, under a big "for sale" sign you have 100% possibilities (read as "certainty") that noone will ever buy it, or the other way round 0% probabilities of ever selling it. Once you have it in plain view on the desk it is possible that someone is interested to it, you will have n% probabilities that someone will buy it, and no matter how little n will be it will always verify the n>=0 condition, with a chance of also verifying the n>0 one. jaclaz

Not here , using on the above file splitinf.cmd dated 16/07/2011, I can find no "ECHO" in any of the files in the "SPLIT_" directory. Nor, after having used join_dedupe_inf.cmd dated 15/07/2011 in the "JOINED_" .inf. BUT there was a problem (NOT related to the ECHO) in beautify.cmd (forgot a few x's, my bad ) Find atttached the SAME splitinf.cmd and join_dedupe_inf.cmd with a corrected beautify.cmd Try again. jaclaz split_inf_4.zip

I still don't get it. And however never seen something like you describe (I mean hundreds of such 0 bytes files). I still don't understand WHY you call them backdoors or zombies or insist on some kind of conspiracy theory. It is either a bug or a mis-setting somewhere. The article you linked to is seemingly about NTFS (and may or may not be connected with FAT32) . What SP level is that Windows 2K? What happens if you disable indexing? (it is mostly unneeded/unuseful anyway) What happens if you just run UNLOCKER on the file(s)? http://www.emptyloop.com/unlocker/ What if you just use another shell instead of Explorer? The pagefile thingy is an alltogether different issue. As you were already told (actually only "hinted toward doing" ): set the pagefile settings to NO pagefile. reboot delete both the C:\pagefile.txt and the D:\pagefile.sys (if still there) set the pagefile again to a fixed size, say 1.5 Gb on the "D:\" drive only see if the pagefile.txt is recreated on C:\ (before running ANY program and having disabled or autostart ones) I suspect that something else -and not Win2K in itself creates that file, as I have used various windows 2K installs for years with a pagefile.sys on a different partition (on same or other disk) and never a "pagefile.txt" file was created anywhere. jaclaz

Topic title edited. Please do review Rules: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?app=forums&module=extras&section=boardrules Particularly #1.a This section is about INSTALLing FROM USB. (i.e. the XP and/or 7 on the USB stick are XP or 7 "setups", if you are looking for RUNning XP or 7 from USB or installing them ON USB you are in the wrong place) Is this what you want? If yes, READ the stickies, particularly this one: As always, rather than going for all and everything at once, start with a single item, get familiar with the tools, then add the rest one by one. jaclaz

Well, that's a can-of-worms I'm saving for later. I can always hope NTLDR will work, until proven wrong by a test. But first we must know whether the boot sector will find NTLDR, to give it a chance to work (or fail)... Why it shouldn't work? I mean NTLDR does work on a "normal" FAT12 floppy, I don't see any "normal" reason why the bootsector shouldn't find NTLDR. Making NTLDR based floppies to boot machines with a corrupted NTLDR or BOOT.INI is (was) a normal task: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305595/en-us http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm jaclaz

I don't get it : Are the complete set of utilities (and instructions) to create such a .iso available or not? Or are they available only for sale? I guess that noone will ever be willing to buy your tools unless they know they do exist and what can be done with them. For the record, my original idea was that of using, just like we have now for 1.2, 1.44 and 2.88 Mb floppies a whole set of "increased size" floppies of "fixed size", like the mentioned here: http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11096 Something along the lines of: 3840 5760 8100 ... .... 36 Mb @dencorso Your method, just like mine, tells me (if it was needed) that you are using a truncated image, and not a sparse one. The (small) advantage of DCOPYNT is that you can avoid making the subtraction and just supply the geometry of the target image, 1024*2*36. Another method would be using the dsfok package: fsz full36Mb.img 37748736 dsfi full36Mb.img 0 0 Fd-36Img.IMA The "full" image compresses in 7-zip to 6035 bytes. Do you think, for the sake of saving 6035-708=5327 bytes of bandwidth, that using the truncated image is convenient?

Yes, my bad corrected in previous post(s)) jaclaz

It would be a start, to find a way to reproduce the three .iso's easily (with a populated image). If you could create three .iso's with the given superfloppy sizes and freedos it would be perfect. If you check the given before link: http://reboot.pro/9916/page__st__28 you will see that using the simple, alternate approach, and as long as we want to only populate the superfloppy image, we can simply use the "header" of the .iso file in conjunction with a "populated image". The "rest of the CD" we will find later a way to populate, if we can reproduce the "header" with mkisofs + (if needed) a few hex edits via batch, rest of the CD should be a "piece of cake" . jaclaz

Is running in "batch mode" SIW to create a report suitable? http://www.gtopala.com/ or SIV? http://rh-software.com/ (mind you I have no idea if either of the above can gather the info you need/want ) jaclaz

Hopefully fixed: the "<=" and "=>" issues the [TAB] issue the two PAUSE (leftover from tests) I don't think the batch is particularly CPU hungry, I presume is the "normal" problem with CMD.EXE (or if you prefer Command Prompt). On my PC running split_inf.cmd raises cpu's usage to around 40%, with peak at around 55% The poorman's way for similar problems has been traditionally that of editing the settings in the \Windows\_default.pif, but cannot really say if it affects "pure batch" execution. (and anyway it rarely does *much* difference) You may want to experiment with : http://mion.faireal.net/BES/ jaclaz split_inf_3.zip

Something has got lost in the movements forward and back of the posts between the two three topics. Just for the record and for reference, here is the "Superfloppy one": And here is the "LS-120" one: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/151957-ls-120-superdisk-drive-under-win98-and-dos/ This (partly) remained on the "wrong" thread: page__st__11 After crashing Nero with some very long Directories, I wrote my own set of CD Writers / ISO Builders. Adding El Torito support was simple. A manual option lets me force Type 0x03 rather than 0x04 for the Boot Image when using Images between 2.88MB and 36MB. I see. Is this app (or set of apps) available? If yes, can you post a link to it? Or is it for "private use"? If yes, can you attach a couple of generated (empty, or with a few redistributable files in them) .iso's? Hex editing a built .iso to set a byte to 0x03 instead of 0x04 is not a problem, but I would like to have an "universal" solution, such as mkisofs may provide. @dencorso Since you are also on this band-wagon and you are in the "make queer filesystems trade", can you prepare three empty superfloppy images sized EXACTLY: I seemingly cannot download the image you posted, but common sense tell's me that no matter how much sparse you made it, it cannot be 708 bytes... (an upload problem? ) ->correction, I managed to download it, now what do you propose to "un-sparse" it? BTW, it should not be a "sparse" image, but rather a "truncated"one. I would use DCOPYNT : http://www.winimage.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3429 http://users.pandora.be/jbosman/applications.html In any case a "normal, non-sparse, non-truncated" image, if empty, will compress in 7z to a few thousands byte.... I will gladly do the experiments with mkisofs to reproduce..... @all Only seemingly off-topic, I find this simplified approach very, very smart: http://reboot.pro/9916/page__st__28'>http://reboot.pro/9916/page__st__28 the whole thread may contain useful info: http://reboot.pro/9916/ jaclaz