jaclaz

The only reason for which one would want a USB stick be seen as a Fixed drive would be to partition it from Windows 2K/XP/2003 and see multiple partitions in it. Hence the need for "flipping" the bit or using either cfadisk.sys or dummydisk.sys filter drivers. Under DOS and Windows 9x/Me there is not such a need, as you have direct access to the drive. jaclaz

We were born ready. BUT, is "mainstream" ready? "Mainstream" should follow EXACTLY and ONLY mainstream MS original info such as: IE cannot be removed from Win98/Me as it is part of the OS IE cannot be removed from 2K/XP as it is part of the OS no NT based system can boot from USB you cannot partition a USB stick as it is a Removable drive (unless you have VISTA) etc. etc. Alternatively: use something experimental, like versions 0.1, 0.2, etc. NOW, actually paying a minimum of attention to what they do and RTFM wait for release 1.0 Final, or better yet, wait another couple of years for the enhanced 3.0, that will also, following the "mainstream" suggestions, "automagically" detect all files you aren't likely to use and remove them while showing an animated wizard and playing a nice tune.... I appreciate your report and suggestions, as long as they are useful to better this thingy , but completely refuse the idea that they are somewhat needed because "lazy mainstream" want to avoid their homework and safely get away with a couple clicks. :whistling: Experimental things are, well, experimental. Why, in my day....: http://www.tinyapps.org/weblog/2007/02/index.html jaclaz

FYI: http://www.msfn.org/board/Generic-98-USB-d...-me-t99220.html jaclaz

Good ideas. Wrong app to implement them. If you multiboot with Vista, the easiest would be to add grub4dos (which is NOT GRUB) to the Vista BCD, see "method #5": http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/Grub4dos.htm http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/install.htm http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/...all.htm#method5 jaclaz

Since most USB sticks of nowadays common size come from manufacturer (NOT bootable) formatted as FAT32, you can now understand how I left a number of people bewildered by the speed of sticks on my good ol' Asus sub-notebook running 2K SP0. (600 Mhz - 10 Gb HD - built in year 2000) Typically I would go to a customer's office, make him copy the files I need (from a very fast - top end - desktop) on one of his sticks, (several tens of seconds), then in a flash read them on my small faithful thingy (also helped by the fact that reading is usually much faster than writing). B) Just imagine the overall amount of time wasted by people waiting for their files to be copied to sticks thanks to the "stupid" upgrade to the drivers the good MS guys made. Unrelated, but maybe worth a read: http://www.msfn.org/board/Generic-98-USB-d...-me-t99220.html jaclaz

I guess before everything else, a hard drive is needed... jaclaz

If you have an occasion to do so , I would like those tests repeated on a comparable machine running Windows 2K. You may find some interesting differences. jaclaz

More generally, in my experience "engineer related" apps usually belong to two categories: 1) "good" apps, "well" written by good programmers that completely fail to deliver the actual needed output as the programmer knows nothing of enginerering and on how engineer work 2) "bad" apps, "approximately" written by an engineer that thinks he is a programmer, that completely fail to be fast and efficient, but deliver the needed output and do that (slowly) while letting the engineer work the way he likes Why programmers and engineers do not usually team together to create something both efficient AND working remains one of the great unresolved misteries..... And this happens in a number of other fields, and expeciallly with "vertical" apps.... jaclaz

Yes, AFAIK the MS tool is made exactly for those situations: http://www.msfn.org/board/Converting-XP-Co...al-t124727.html What do you mean by "system builder", "OEM"? I guess that the FAQ's could be useful: http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads...?displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/mpa.aspx jaclaz

Sure , maybe that's the origin of the "should" and particularly of the "relatively well". jaclaz

For those with low bandwith (the .pdf is 11Mb) there is also the online htm version, here: http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200810/enter.html The article is here: http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200810/page03.html I guess you were confused by the sentence, I think that actually the Author wanted to say that Virtualbox should work well with all those systems, not that nlite works with them. jaclaz

Well, actually you should put both the MBR AND Bootsector in a .zip file and attach it here. But how do they compare against calculated data? jaclaz

WHAT is the question? You asked about a possible way, you were given several choices, now, choose one and maybe someone can give you some related links. jaclaz

Open the excel file in any hex editor and replace some random bytes, expecially those that do not correspond to "readable" characters. jaclaz

You can also use a "side app" of Qemu to convert image types: qemu-img.exe http://bellard.org/qemu/ http://www1.interq.or.jp/~t-takeda/qemu/ jaclaz

On second thought, you may also want to try one of the really "slim" builds: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=4696 PicoXP or nativeEX barebone are really small (of course some features are removed). jaclaz

Some programs will accept: ECHO. | <program_name> Basically by ECHO. you produce an empty line (only made of a CR+LF) and then you | <program_name> pipe it to the program. jaclaz

Actually you should be able to boot with Ramdisk on a 128 Mb system, if you really slim the booting part and boot in Ramdisk a NTFS compressed image, with a hardlink to another .img on the CD. There is NO DOS in PE, there is cmd.exe. Search on 911CD board for posts by Sanbarrow and Pavel, they use this method for some builds. A recent thread on boot-land about this specific topic: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...ic=5958&hl= (though no one-size-fits-all-solution yet) jaclaz

Good find. The link is this one: http://thesoftpro.tripod.com/downloads/fe/index.htm (more explicit) jaclaz

You are young, definitely not stupid, but your google-fu: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=google-fu is still weak.... To be more accurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_version#Beta Traditionally programs, before "official" release are named ALPHA until they are in experimental stage (for internal users only) and BETA when most of the problems have already been solved and the program is "mature" to be tested in a wider group (Beta testers), that can be a restricted one or a public one. In the latter case BETA means usually "it should work, but don't count too much on it, and don't come back here weeping, we told you". jaclaz

Comeon people, always check for other sources: http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/dellbug.asp http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/16/the-del...onspiracy-hoax/ Photos come from here: http://www.dansdata.com/keyghost.htm and the fake letter is taken partially from here: http://rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne/homel..._gannon_404.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20060213151400/...elandletter.gif http://web.archive.org/web/20060213151421/...landletter2.gif and is a three years old hoax, no news. jaclaz

I had a somewhat deeper look at the batch. It is a GOOD idea and the code is OK BUT, in a nutshell, I do not like it. I mean, I feel like it is overly complex, and it is possible that it won't work on some localized versions. (changing the "Removable" to "mov" should cover a number of European ones) I did a couple of check and some temp files can be made unneeded. Still, I could not find a way to manage diskpart without a temp file. While researching about it, I found something I had never seen (or better never paid attention to) that may be a better approach: WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command): http://www.ss64.com/nt/wmic.html http://www.robvanderwoude.com/wmic.html http://www.robvanderwoude.com/wmigen.html http://www.robvanderwoude.com/arrays_bat.html Maybe this could be a "slimmer" approach. Check the attached example. jaclaz testwmic.zip

It may work in my system due to some of the numerous updates I've added, so your testing is important to decide whether it works or not. Will do, though I don't have a "plain" Win98 installed anywhere accessible right now. jaclaz

It actually depends on the files you actually have on your machine. Some OEM pre-installed systems do have a \I386 directory on HD. Check these: http://www.msfn.org/board/Help-restore-cd-frust-t70301.html http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16381 It can be a long and cumbersone process, however. jaclaz

If I may, the more mails people at Sony support receive asking for x64 bit drivers, the more probable it is that they will come out, one day or the other, probably this won't help you presently, but may help you or other people in the future, if there is enough requests they will be "forced" to produce them, unless they want to lose market quotas in favour of other "x64 friendly" competitors. jaclaz