jaclaz

Yes. The problem is seemingly in the actual firmware. Some details are in the main thread, starting here: http://www.msfn.org/board/seagate-barracud...-page-1007.html for roughly three pages. The issue in itself is stoopid enough: when you power on the drive and internal LOG was left to entry 320 or any value satisfying the expression 320+n*256 the drive bricks itself. IF you have a working drive AND you upgrade it's firmware AND the firmware is NOT bugged, the drive will last on average like any other one. The fix is made in two steps: unbrick a bricked drive making it working loop to 1. above Point is that due to the TOTAL and UTTERLESS lack of any form of brightness, courtesy, politeness and open-mindedness from the Seagate people, BOTH in the Technical and Support services AND on their Forum, there is NO way to know for sure: IF any given new firmware is appropriate to the specific drive IF any given new firmware release solves the problem (without introduceing OTHER bugs) What they tell people with a bricked drive is more or less: you are NOT affected by the problem (which means in plain English: you are a liar, your drive is not bricked) if you send the drive in we will replace it, should we find it to be defective under the Warranty Terms, recovery of your data is not provided, you should have backed it up if the drive gets lost on the way to us or on the way back it's your problem we may send you back at our exclusive discretion (and we won't tell you in advance whether you will get back): your drive revived with all data intact (not because we will recover the data, but only if the data happens to be there, and we won't even tell you if this is likely to happen or not) a refurbished drive a new drive [*]Since we won't admit that there is a problem, it is obvious that we cannot tell you that firmware xxxx will fix that problem (that only exists in your mind) As I see it the product is not worse or better than that of the competitors, every firm has had (or will have) a "badly born" model or series, but definitely the Support sucks. Reality (and as proven by the number of reported successes) is: an average technician can fix the issue in no more than 15 minutes and NO data will be lost a complete n00b can fix it in a few attempts/several hours and NO data will be lost it is utterly stoopid to send drives back and forth if not actually needed (have you ever seen the delicacy with which UPS or FedEx - or any other courier for that matter - manage parcels?) as you have the concrete risk of damage or loss during this stage In my opinion if they had printed DON'T PANIC in large, friendly letters on their Web Site told people not to worry, that their data and drive could be recovered allright admitted the hiccup apologized for the inconveniences provided documental evidence of the reason of the problem and of the way they fixed it in later releases outsourced the recovery to local (say) TV repairers or Computer Shops for (say) US $10 apiece, asking Customers to bring personally the drive in the shop, and collect it after a couple of days, they would have : saved lots of money saved lots of fuel and packing/shipping costs (a small contribution to the fight against entropy) had a plethora of admired Customers that would have LOVED them for the rest of their life (no matter if their drive is good or not) The way they chose they have had ALL their sentient customers really, really mad at them (again no matter if their drive is good or not). jaclaz

@martha Some reference it's NOT so hidden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(p...l)#Legal_issues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing_and_the_law http://www.mininova.org/faq#legal http://www.what-is-torrent.com/legality http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Legal_torrent_sites In other words: you seem more like: I am more like: jaclaz

As long as you won't ask me to marry you, I guess it's allright , my wife won't like it, though. jaclaz

This might be the right occasion for an old dinosaur to become useful, so, how much are you gonna pay for this? Seriously, I am perplexed about the actual "fairness" of this. I mean wouldn't it be a way to "workaround" the only limit they put into the app for personal use? Since, besides peing picky, grumpy and cheap , I am also paricularly catty , I will tell you that it is possible (with a little limitation that I won't specify) jaclaz

Yep , but sometimes you simply need to do some experiments yourself. You simply cannot beat the experience you get in trying things (and failing, and correcting the error and finally succeeding): Since there are no problems with multiple partitions on USB devices seen as fixed (please read as USB HDD), you can do whatever you prefer. B) I still advice everyone to have a small FAT16 (or FAT32, it's the same nowadays) first Active Primary (boot) partition and put all the rest in Logical Volumes inside extended, but this is my (and Gilles Vollant's ) proven working way for the most failsafe settings, not necessarily the "right" one. jaclaz

I would try assigning "Launchy" (whatever it is) to that key combination from INSIDE autohotkey.... jaclaz

Autohotkey overriding: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Hotkeys.htm http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/misc/Override.htm Should work. jaclaz

We (and grub4dos ) are NOT racists against FAT32 or NTFS. It's binary: If grub4dos can access a filasystem=1 If grub4dos cannot=0 Right now grub4dos supports: FAT12 FAT16 FAT32 NTFS EXT2FS/EXT3FS + of course CDFS jaclaz

Barry Manilow? I thought that only "Shpongle - Nothing Lasts... But Nothing is Lost" was so <please place here a word that Board wordfilters won't like> pretentious to actually be able to damage a DVD drive.... jaclaz

You joking right? NT4 has NO IE "forced upon". That was most of the work FDV did, removing it ALSO from 2K. jaclaz

Wouldn't, more simply ERUNT do? You make a copy of the Registry on the stick, you do whatever you want to do and you restore the Registry copy when leaving. ERUNT: http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/ If you want to remove some common changes (and the traces of your USB stick too), you can use this: Clean after me http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/clean_after_me.html jaclaz

I am failing to see the problem. You boot a PE of some kind or from a second OS instance and defragment all you want on the offline system volumes. Without the above: Registry can be defragmented (meaning the internal Registry filesystem) normally: http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/ Pagefile and system files can be defragged with pagedefrag: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb897426.aspx using boot-time defragmenting. Particular cases can be solved using Contig: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb897428.aspx or Wincontig: http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/ Most defrag utilities will have boot-time defragmentation too. Ultradefrag comes to mind: http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/ jaclaz

That is the actual half of your question I initially replied to. http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9820 In a nutshell, and presuming that by "Microsoft doubleboot screen" you are actually meaning BOOTMGR and it's BCD: BOOTMGR can only load WINLOAD.EXE and NTLDR+BOOT.INI (or grldr+menu.lst) NOT a bootsector AFAIK. (please read "bootsector" as "Windows 98") NTLDR+BOOT.INI can load a Windows NT pre-Vista OS AND a bootsector. grldr+menu.lst can: load a bootsector directly chainload IO.SYS or NTLDR or BOOTMGR bypassing the bootsector PBR code So you can go: MBR->PBR->BOOTMGR->BCD->Windows Vista or 7 MBR->PBR->BOOTMGR->BCD->NTLDR->BOOT.INI->NT OS pre-Vista MBR->PBR->BOOTMGR->BCD->NTLDR->BOOT.INI->bootsector->Windows 98's IO.SYS or: grldr.mbr->grldr->menu.lst->BOOTMGR->BCD->Windows Vista or 7 grldr.mbr->grldr->menu.lst->NTLDR->BOOT.INI->NT OS pre-Vista grldr.mbr->grldr->menu.lst->IO.SYS Or ANY "intermediate", like, just as an example: MBR->PBR->grldr->menu.lst->BOOTMGR->BCD->Windows Vista or 7 MBR->PBR->grldr->menu.lst->NTLDR->BOOT.INI->NT OS pre-Vista MBR->PBR->grldr->menu.lst->IO.SYS MBR->PBR->grldr->menu.lst->BOOTMGR->BCD->NTLDR->BOOT.INI->NT OS pre-Vista MBR->PBR->grldr->menu.lst->BOOTMGR->BCD->NTLDR->BOOT.INI->->bootsector->Windows 98's IO.SYS There is a visual demonstration of multibooting here: http://www.multibooters.co.uk/multiboot.html jaclaz

Well, if you like to play the game with semi-random hints, then here is another one: http://www.sysint.no/nedlasting/mbrfix.htm And yet another one: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...ic=9897&hl= jaclaz

You are right, that won't normally happen, but I am failing to understand the overall description of the setup and of the problem, thus really cannot say waht's going on. A Recovery partition, and expecially a DELL one is not normally visible as it carries an ID of "DE" or "DB" or "D7" for oldish versions: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/ http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/dellmbr.htm http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm or a "DE" for "Vista" versions: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/vista.htm but it is well possible that newish machines are different. jaclaz

@allanf Right idea , wrong link . This one is for DOS and 9x/Me: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/51978 2K (and presumably later) work slightly differently: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234048/en-us At least XP and Vista work like the latter, so I presume that PE 3.0, will as well. jaclaz

Just for the record the app is originated from China, and has an English "homepage": http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9460 http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8986 jaclaz

If you ask a clear question, it would be easier to understand what you are asking and possibly give you an answer. Try breaking your sentence in short, simple sentences like: I want to install ...... I want to use ..... I want to create .... etc., etc. FDISK.EXE is a DOS tool. bootpart.exe is BOTH DOS and Windows NT/2K/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7 one. And the answer, at the moment is YES, but NO (provided I actually did understand your question ): http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9820 jaclaz

You are welcome, though please take into account that what I described is what such a program SHOULD do, not necessarily what it does. I mean for all we know it could well simply copy files back and forth in a given order. If it works flawlessly under XP as dencorso reported, by instinct I doubt that it accesses filesystem structures directly. I guess more tests need to be made to check what it actually does. jaclaz

Glad to hear that there is another happy bunny in the basket : http://www.msfn.org/board/cant-access-repa...27-page-10.html The problem is that the sky may fall on our head tomorrow.... http://www.asterix-international.de/asterix/characters.shtml jaclaz

I am pretty sure that the Microsoft representative that supplied you those .iso's will be happy to help you in solving the problem with the OEM PC's. I doubt that you would get support for the use of nlite in a commercial environment, though. Should you have missed the new revolutions in technology, a media called CDRW has been developed, and found to be useful to avoid coasters. jaclaz

My intended use was far more "low-level" or "practical" : . I often happen to have a PC on a network not working - usually they are NOT using dynamic addresses/DHCP. Once set properly whatever needs to be set/fixed, which often involves uninstalling TCP/IP and re-installing it (or at least this is a method that often works for me), I normally need: the machine intended IP <-relatively easy to remember the subnet mask <- easy to detect, as I use to have it set to a "reasonable number" based on the number of PC's, not the usual 255.255.255.0 the network gateway <- easy to remember, I usually have them set as first IP of the subnet mask) the Primary DNS <- difficult to remember, as different networks use different providers and differnt DNS (and most of them are NOT pingable) the Secundary DNS <-see above The two "magic numbers above" are good enough to be remembered and should allow me to test: external TCP/IP connectivity by pinging external internet connectivity by using them to get to google without having to remember 74.125.45.100 jaclaz

The stick should boot to grub4dos allright. In other words, the log you posted contains NO errors related to "Could not install Grub4Dos bootsector...", or anyway, nothing that prevented the program to work. jaclaz

Oww, comeon is one of the Microsoft Foundation Class, most C apps need one, the MFC42U.DLL is however the Unicode NT version. BUT : http://www.mdgx.com/add.htm It re-writes the "index" of the files without rearranging the actual position of them. When you copy a number of files the filesystem more or less does: write an entry for File1 in the FAT write the actual File1 in the filesystem write an entry for File2 in the FAT write the actual File2 in the filesystem ... write an entry for Filen in the FAT write the actual Filen in the filesystem To simplify in the FAT the pointers are stored like (for the first two files): File1->Address1/File2->Address2 And in a filesystem the files are stored like: File1/File2/ If File1=zyzzyva.txt and File2=aardvark.txt, if you DEFRAG using a sorting algorithms you have: To simplify in the FAT the pointers are stored like (for the first two files): File2->Address2/File1->Address1 And in a filesystem the files are stored like: File2/File1/ if you use one of these utilities you have: File2->Address1/File1->Address2 And in a filesystem the files are stored like (UNchanged): File1/File2/ jaclaz

Yep, but it doesn't say "WARNING: if you use -u2 you can use only 8.3 names". The ISO9660 NEEDS the "-n" to add the ISO9660 extensions for long file names, UDF should have "long file names" since the very beginning. FYI: http://www.msfn.org/board/oscdimg-error-t111776.html jaclaz