jaclaz

Well, you try it, then decide yourself : User State Migration in Windows XP http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457090.aspx jaclaz

Doing BEFORE connecting the hard disk, a LOOPBACK test, as explained in point #8 of the read-me-first: in order to make sure that: the converter is functional the orange and yellow wires (on your partular adapter) are actually Tx/Rx the PC can actually communicate with the converter jaclaz

Are you sure YOU are connected? (besides the loose cables) ALL connections should be FIRM, ALWAYS, in ANYTHING connected (pardon me the pun) to electricity or electronics. There is NO possible way to exchange Tx and Rx in a loopback test! You connect the Tx with the Rx, and that is the loopback test. Quite obviously if you connect the Rx with the Tx you have EXACTLY the same as the above. jaclaz

Still, this attains to WinsetupfromUSB and has NOTHING to do with "Unattended". Go here: http://www.msfn.org/board/forum/157-install-windows-from-usb/ and search and read, most answers are ALREADY there. Some info on the set of menu.lst can be found in this seemingly UNrelatred thread on boot-land: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=12449 Mind you, it is assumed that you ALREADY have a more than basic knowledge of grub4dos syntax and "way of working" in order to understand the above topic, you will need to read (and learn) starting from here: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=66 AFTER having read the Guide: http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/Grub4dos.htm jaclaz

If I may, you are trying to do a rather complex (but as seen not impossible ) thing from anothe OS that you know NOTHING (or very little) about. If you really attempted to dd from a .iso to a USB stick, you, no offence whatsoever intended , lack the minimal basic knowledge on how a .iso and a USB stick actually work and boot. I do suspect that this lack of knowledge (again, nothing "bad" in it) extends also to the XP side. ANY knowledgeable Linux user can take the BATCH based USB_multiboot.cmd: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=111406 and "translate" it's contents in to BASH or whatever scripting language. As well, an expert Linux user can read the "historical" thread that contains most (if not all) the needed info: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=61384 In other words all the nice apps/batches/whatever you can find here are nothing but an automated way to repeat the steps you can do manually (and that you can replicate on another running OS). But, all in all, WHAT is the reason WHY you would want to do this from Linux? I mean, you need anyway a Windows XP install CD. You can install XP in a VM under Linux and use the "windows programs" to create the USB stick allright. jaclaz

Traitor! (Just kidding ) It is mostly the same reasons that drove me from NT 4.00 to Win2k a few years ago: lack of new hardware support (but I still have a couple of internal servers running NT4 and going allright. I guess we are doomed. Obviously within a few hours someone will post that using XP is crazy and that you should immediately update to Vista or 7 jaclaz

The general idea about ISO is that they are READ ONLY. .iso editors usually work, BUT, expecially with bootable .iso they often fail. The ONLY workaround you have (short of re-creating the .iso with OSCDIMG or mkisofs, which is what you should normally do) is to create a "padded" .xml file (i.e. a file with a number of spaces at the end) large enough to contain all possible modifications, and use any dd-like program or Winimage (Shareware) that has this feature, to replace this "fattened" UNATTENDED.XML with the edited file with the EXACT SAME size. In other words, supposing that your standard UNATTENDED.XML is 3487 bytes in size, you add to it, say 113 trailing spaces, so that it becomes 3600 bytes, then create your "master" .iso. When you modify the UNATEENDED.XML, you add or remove as many of the trailing spaces so that the size remains EXACTLY 3600 bytes, then you use a dd-like program or a hex editor or winimage to replace the file in the .iso image. jaclaz

Also Adobe Reader, Paint and Excel cannot. Which kind of question is it? A program is either designed to do something or it is not. And yes, our k-martian legend does have some misconceptions.... but it would be too lengthy to do a full immersion course about partition structures and filesystems and most of the related things, default sizes of FATs, etc. are either UNdocumented or misdocumented. Even Partition Magic and Acronis apps in some versions were not reliable, and judging from the amount of versions of the various Linux based partitioning/resizing tools, even them have their quirks. In a nutshell, if you want to be 100% safe DO NOT trust ANY partition resizing/moving program, it is much safer to backup, delete partition, create new partition and restore data. Even a MS original tool like CONVERT may create problems... : http://redmondmag.com/articles/2004/01/01/build-a-better-ntfs-converter.aspx jaclaz

Sure , noone said there was a problem in the hardware, the problem is within the drivers. The point is that most graphic card manufacturers have developed "special" drivers that can workaround the "basic" Windows 2000 limitation, point is if the maker of your graphic card has made these drivers and if they are available. WHICH driver are you currently using under 2K? http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Neomagic_MagicGraph256ZX THe IBM one: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-4GXLS3.html http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-4GXL5N.html Seems like NOT being able to manage multi monitor properly, and it seems like the promised update was never released. You may try other drivers, but be WARNED: it's tricky business and you may well end up with an unbootable machine. Examples: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/migr-4q2klz.html http://search.euro.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=uk&l=en&cs=&k=neomagic&cat=sup&x=0&y=0 even if they don't make your laptop unbootable they will probably need to be modified/tweaked. jaclaz

Yep. Additionally, recent reports imply that BOOTMGR versions *all* work, or at least we have here an example where the Vista SP0 version is used to initiate the install of many later versions: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8043 https://sites.google.com/site/rmprepusb/tutorials/how-to-create-a-usb-drive-that-will-install-vista-win7-and-server-2008 OT, but not much a nice BCD editor can be found here: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10003&hl= jaclaz

Well, NO. "According to Microsoft" tells nothing, WHERE have you read this piece of info? (link please) You might be confusing a "by design" issue from Microsoft that has been by now solved by most Video card manufacturers with their "special" drivers: http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/faq.asp WHICH EXACT notebook make/model is it? WHICH EXACT video card has it? It is very probable that with this info it will be possible to find a suitable driver. jaclaz

You are supposing "wrong". BOOTMGR is a BOOT ManaGeR, the one that comes with Vista , Server 2008 and Windows 7. Various versions of BOOTMGR are backwards compatible. The BOOTMGR file is run from the bootsector of the CD/DVD and reads it's settings from the BCD store a file that is usually in \boot\BCD. You normally have only one BOOTMGR and only one BCD, this latter with multiple choices. READ the initial post of this thread, essentially it tells how to edit the contents of the boot\BCD to have in it the multiple choices. jaclaz

@Bloubul JFYI: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=145646 http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=145646&st=5 jaclaz

No need to. Hard disks and optical media work differently and you probably thought to estend your experience with CD/DVD's to actual hard disks.... jaclaz

Any reference to backup this statement? (Last time I checked outer tracks were WAY faster than inner ones , and data was allocate form the outside to the inside ) http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/tracksZBR-c.html http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/244351-14-partion-hard-drive-performance http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/courses/cs252-F00/lectures/lec20-disks.pdf jaclaz

IMHO the easiest way to use Nero is NOT using it at all. Get IMGBURN (Freeware): http://www.imgburn.com/ Follow instructions: http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=61 jaclaz

SRDISK: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=109574 http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=109574&st=13 http://sourceforge.net/projects/srdisk/ jaclaz

For simply splitting/combining pages, check this also: http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ And everything here may also interest you: http://www.paehl.de/pdf/ (which include a GUI for PDFTK): http://www.paehl.de/pdf/gui_pdftk.html Though personally I find this one more handy: http://angusj.com/pdftkb/ And yes, if you are not fast enough in making a decision I'll probably increase the amount of your research by tenfold jaclaz

Something you might want to have a look at: http://www.nativewindsofmontana.com/software/tomahawk.html http://www.nativewindsofmontana.com/software/pdfwizard.html jaclaz

What about circumventing them rules ? Example: boot from the stick a PE of some kind (remapping the HDD's with grub4dos) and install (still from the OEM CD) with WINNT32.EXE What about simply cheating ? Example: boot from the stick (remapping the HDD's with grub4dos) and start the install (still from the OEM CD) chainloading the SETUPLDR.BIN in CD's \I386\ , thus bypassing the BOOTFIX.BIN (please read as "The thing that makes the Press any key... message appear") jaclaz

Are you really sure that making a Partition changes the MBR (and NOT the PBR, i.e. Partition Boot Record or bootsector)? The 2K/XP/2003 PBR or bootsector invokes NTLDR. The Vista /2008/7 PBR or bootsector invokes BOOTMGR. Here: http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/install_windows.htm#windows1 http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/install_windows.htm#windows3 http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/boot.htm#vista http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/boot.htm#linux etc., etc. jaclaz

Maybe there is a omission in: http://www.robotshop.ca/sfe-db9-rs232-shifter.html Try reading it as: Had you actually READ the read-me-first: (point #11) you might have had NOT this problem. jaclaz

Sure, that is an EXAMPLE. It has *some* PATHs checked. You still need to add yourself the checks to avoid it running where you want it NOT to run, if for any reason: "%PROGRAMFILES%" does not expand to "C:\Program Files" (like a non-English version of the OS or different PATH settings) or "%SYSTEMROOT%" does not expand to "C:\Windows" (like running the batch in a booted PE) etc., etc. What if you try googling for self-delete batch? http://www.catch22.net/tuts/selfdel WARNING, these kind of things will SELF-DESTRUCT (and it won't even take 5 seconds to do so) jaclaz

yes, but that is an EXAMPLE, post describing WHAT you see when trying booting from USB. Post also detailing: WHICH tool/utility/program did you use toe Partition and Format the USB stick and make it bootable. WHICH settings/options did you use with the above utility/whatever. Please do REPLY to the posted requests for info, WITHOUT posting other questions. The general idea: you provide info and report about what is happening and what you did and what you want to do. a willing helping member tries to understand from remote and based ONLY on what you report what is happening. he/she may need to ask you further info, again,we make the questions, you try replying them. IF such willing member manages to understand what the problem is he may be able to give you a solution. Compare with: http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html Ow, come on, not that difficult, you try to boot from it, if it works,it is bootable, if it doesn't it is NOT. Now, please READ my previous post and try doing what I suggested you in it, and report. jaclaz

Yes. Missing question: NO. I also have a CD-ROM drive that doesn't work and goes clickity-clickity, but I DO NOT post on a thread that is dedicated to: BSY on 7200.11 LBA0 on 7200.11 ONLY. I think I'll delete the READ-ME-FIRST : judging from it's utility and the times it is actually read FIRST, noone will miss it. Your drive is NOT a 7200.11 AND it doesn't suffer from the BSY or LBA0. Please start a new thread APTLY titled or post in the existing 7200.10 thread BlouBul was so kind as to find for you. jaclaz