jaclaz

Two different questions, and unfortunately NO definite answer. First question: Did I do the appropraite steps? Who knows , it is very well possible that your hard disk suffered from ANOTHER problem at that you did all the "RIGHT" steps, but for the "WRONG" problem, or it is as likely that you did the "WRONG" steps on the "RIGHT" problem. Unless the DIY interface was assembled by a demented moron, it should have made no difference, even if it was put together by a headless chicken, three possibilities: it works, i.e. you can issue data in the hyperterminal and get feedback it doesn't work, i.e. you CANNOT issue data in the hyperterminal and/or CANNOT get feedback it fries the PCB of the drive Since from what you report #2 and #3 didn't happen, I guess that the converter is OK. That is NOT a data recovery company, it is probably some kind of guy that "recovers" data in his basement or they didn't tell you all, or you omitted to say that you experienced several minutes of a hard grinding noise coming from the hard disk. A "head crash" technically is when, for whatever reason, including verticall acceleration beyond the sustainable one by the drive (i.e. falling) one or more heads come in contact with the magnetic surface of one or more platters. The damage to DATA is limited to those parts of the disk surface that were actually "engraved" by the contact, unless, as said, the drive has been kept spinning with the head "locked" in contact and the head arm has been made travel on all the surfaces. On multiple platters drives ONLY ONE surface of ONE platter (where the head crashed and that was used to "broom" all over) will be damaged. Otherwise it would be a multiple head crash, pretty much rare, i.e. since all platters are "double face" it would mean that all superior heads crashed on all superior surfaces and that all inferior heads crashed on all inferior surfaces, something that I would deem as very, very improbable. It is usually possible, but you will need to find a reputable recovery company and it will cost you a lot of money , to "transplant" the platters from your "deceased" drive to another "alive" one and thus recover at least part of the data. jaclaz

Of course NO. Size of the stick in bytes NEEDS to be a prime number, but not a Mersenne one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime Additionally and of course, the formatting has to be carried on with FULL moon, otherwise it won't ever work. Just TRY it! jaclaz

Read this seemingly unrelated thread: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?s=&showtopic=127593 http://www.msfn.org/board/funny-thing-happ...593-page-6.html If you don't have a "real" floppy, get a "virtual" one. An alternative is using Winimage to open the self-extracting self-copying .exe and save the contents to .ima (uncompressed) NOT as .imz (compressed): http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm jaclaz

The "term" you need is "grub4dos", but you don't even need searching for it, start reading: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=66 Then, we will talk about the other things: jaclaz

Well, there is googling and googling : http://www.robvanderwoude.com/ http://www.robvanderwoude.com/ntfor.php jaclaz

@Ponch I am confused by the FOR loop from 1 to 100. Are we "talking" 2K/XP right? Wouldn't: FOR /L %%C IN (1,1,100) do? jaclaz

Well, if I were an IT professional , I would look here: and here: jaclaz

And now that you have become familiar with pie charts, you should learn about the "real thing", i.e. "treemaps": http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoe...on/sequoiaview/ jaclaz

You joking right? I usually shout this, NOT "hear" it. Point is that it greatly depends on how the BIOS handles the thing. Your stick is actually a partitioned device, i.e. it has a MBR and 63 hidden sector (MBR+62). What a BIOS may do is to simply "ignore" the first 63 sectors and access the partition bootsector as if it was first sector instead of the 64th, thus "removing" all info about the partition (and "vanifying" the NT boot process using Disk Signature). There are quite a few reports of these "strange" BIOS behaviour, but, mainly due to posters "abandoning" the game, there is NO real, solid, documented solution, AFAIK. fbinst can use a workaround to this behaviour, that may (or may completely fail to) work in your specific case. Maybe reading this seemingly unrelated threads will clear the matter (or completely confuse you ): http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=7507 http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...=5766&st=77 jaclaz

Nice. Stickied. jaclaz

Not sure which one you have in mind, but is it the attachmen t in post #97? http://www.msfn.org/board/solved-usbstick-...p;view=findpost http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?act=at...st&id=26992 And BTW- not only theoretically capable, practically as well I must have read it wrongly, in there, which is here : http://www.msfn.org/board/solved-usbstick-...80-page-96.html (stoopid board software is still working, or better NOT working on a random base) You said you had a C program which you couldn't translate to AutoIT. On the AutoIt board you posted an AutoIt program: http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/index.ph...104426&st=8 that seemingly has glitches in it, as seen in later posts. So I will try to rephrase : Have you got now a fully working AutoIt program? If yes, you should also have understood the algorithm behind it, which is what I would be interested in, NOT into the CODE (C or AutoIt or whatever) that implements the algorithm. jaclaz

Really strange, the MBR is allright, it appears like one created with RMPREPUSB. The stoopid BIOS must be checking for the "Removable" status of the stick, though it's the first time I see something like that. Which motherboard is it? You have probably two ways out: find out the manufacturer of the stick, find the Production Tool for it and "flip" the "removable" bit to have the stick seen as fixed (best) try using fbinst: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9460 Try running Chipgenius on the stick: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=4661 if your key is one for which a suitable software can be found, it is the easiest (and permanent) solution. jaclaz

Well, just post some details of the USB sticks you have handy as seen by Chipgenius and I can surely give you a link to a manufacturer tool for at least one of them with which you can zero out the serial number. @ilko_t Today I was able to reach the Autoit forum link, so you have something theoretically capable of generating the hashes and you are keeping it for yourself? jaclaz

Well, NO. If your BIOS has a "USB HDD" option, it should be able to recognize a USB stick with a proper MBR on it as a partitioned device. This has nothing to do with booting or not booting, is about booting as HD vs. booting as superfloppy. Use HDhacker: http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/ to save first sector of the Physicaldrive corresponding to your USB stick , compress it in a .zip archive and attach it to your next post, I'd like to have a look at it. jaclaz

Yep. Shouting at hardware really hard sometimes helps, also : http://www.msfn.org/board/hard-drive-backu...37-page-14.html jaclaz

I don't really want to seem rude, as I usually am not , but you must understand that this is not a Forum led by "experts" in the matter, if you read attentively the thread you will see that is populated mainly by people who have problems with the methods described (and NOT "other" methods) and a bunch of guys that try to help them with the described methods ONLY. Switching pcb's is a NO-NO on modern hard drives. Last character in the above sentence is a "full stop" or "period". The usual approach, mind you "generic" description, not necessarily the right one for your problem , is to either use professional tools such as (example) PC3000: http://www.pc3000.com/ or phisically de-solder the actual flash from one PCB and re-solder it on the other one. Both the above need more than average skills and specific training, besides the actual tools, AFAIK, and I doubt that anyone here is either knowledgeable enough or should he be willing to "sell his trade" for free. Really, I am sorry for your troubles , but I do presume that you won't get here a solution to your problem, you might want to try your chances with an "experts" board, like this one: http://forum.hddguru.com/ or evaluate the idea of asking for a professional recovery service. In any case, when posting long stretches of code, please enclose them in [ codebox ] [ /codebox ] tags, to help the readability of the thread. jaclaz

What happens with the "No to all" trick?: http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idi...mer/?p=83398413 Personally I would use a "backup" like app, like robocopy or strarc: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html http://www.ltr-data.se/files/strarc.txt jaclaz

@broughha DO NOT double post. Replied here: http://www.msfn.org/board/lot-rubbish-t139563.html&hl= jaclaz

Grounding should mean that ANY device connected is grounded together. I.e. ALL boards/devices/whatever should have the 0V (usually black) cables connected together. Do check also speed/parity settings in hyperterminal. Try getting the power for the CA-42 by the SAME 220V to SATA PSU. jaclaz

I seem not able to connect to the autoit place. And of course I do not understand the C code. Anyway keep going. jaclaz

@Fernando Thanks , I misinterpreted johnc, I read "USB drives" (which is what he wrote ) instead of "USB Floppy". jaclaz

Sorry for the OT , but I would be interested in understanding more of the above. In my experience txtsetup.oem's have always been kinda relaxed type of files , but didn't allow USB drives, I would be interested in makng a pretty much calm txtsetup.oem that allowed drivers on USB drives. jaclaz

Problem is "open in current directory". There is also this one: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...c=2624&st=2 A couple of old topics: http://www.msfn.org/board/cmd-window-curre...enu-t57907.html http://www.msfn.org/board/util-shell-exten...xp-t111384.html I guess this: http://www.msfn.org/board/util-shell-exten...384-page-8.html is what you are looking for. (and yes it works allright on 2K) jaclaz

As a workaround. when you are at the grub4dos choice, press "c" to get to command line. In it type: geometry (hd0) [ENTER] and geometry (hd1) [ENTER] in order to make sure which of the two is the stick (it should be (hd0) as the drives have not been yet exchanged). Then issue the command: makeactive (hd0,1) [ENTER] to make the second partition active OR makeactive (hd0,2) [ENTER] to make the third partition active. Then issue the commands: find --set-root /menu.lst [ENTER] configfile /menu.lst [ENTER] to get back to the choices. In this cases BOOTMGR and /boot/BCD have to be in the same partition that is made active. Report what happens. If this approach works, you can add the makeactive commands in the menu.lst. jaclaz

The good news (or bad news ) are: the: http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool returns: And look which results do you have actually searching: http://store.microsoft.com/search.aspx?tsq=iso-tool Page is cached here (at least right now): http://209.85.135.132/search?q=cache:Ry9mm...ool%22&cd=3 The link to the Windows7-USB-DVD-tool.exe is not there anymore. The tool requires required .Net, in order to be simple and small..... jaclaz