jaclaz

As I see it, we need to take another factor out of the equation. Cannot you borrow a GOOD, standard XP install CD to test it in the kvm? It is equally possible that the problem is due to either: 1) ANOTHER corrupted file or more generally a .iso problem 2) the install process on the VM 3) ANOTHER until now not pointed out reason The "new" error you are getting could be due to the "original" WIN51 file. Another test you can make is to remove/change the tag files: http://www.msfn.org/board/Edit-txtsetupsif...o-M-t65541.html http://www.msfn.org/board/multiboot-and-nlite-t99385.html Also, some semi-random questions: Which app did you use to create the .iso? With which syntax/command line? How big is the .iso? jaclaz

Yep, it was a DOS reminiscence when jolting down it. Though in this case the "spaces in the name" appear to be not a problem. OT, but not much, have you had any experience with the "nul.ext" ? http://www.msfn.org/board/Batch-Scripts-fo...ure-t98853.html http://www.msfn.org/board/batch-programming-t105969.html I mean, it seems like your "direct" approach is allright if you are sure that there is NO file with the same name as the searched folder, but would probably fail (later) if this rare case applies. The \nul approach does not work with spaces in names (read quoted path). What about the \nul.ext ? jaclaz

AFAIK: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16381 http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...16381&st=18 ALL WIN51IP.SPx files have to be empty. It is possible that ANOTHER file was copied incorrectly, though. Re-read the previously given links and expecially fdv's advice, in your case of a "doubtful" source, this comment is particularly valid. jaclaz

Resource Hacker: http://angusj.com/resourcehacker/ Freeware Resouce Tunner => Resource Tuner, OK: http://www.restuner.com/ $39.95 Restortorar=>Restorator, OK: http://www.bome.com/Restorator/ Price: 60 Euros (approx. US$ 85) Other Freeware ones: http://www.wilsonc.demon.co.uk/d10resourceeditor.htm http://www.resedit.net/ jaclaz

Since there are a number of repetitive tasks, all of them "name" oriented, wouldn't something like this (just an example, NOT tested, DO NOT take it as "final" code ) be simpler/handier? set scriptpath=U:\NewApps\ConfigurationManagement\ set viewpath=U:\NewApps\Quiz36\TCC\Code\ set /p thumb_dr= What is the thumb drive letter ? if not exist %thumb_dr%:\nearfield\nul md %thumb_dr%:\nearfield cd /d %thumb_dr%:\nearfield set logfile=%thumb_dr%:\nearfield\log.txt echo .>%logfile% copy %scriptpath%Scripts\*& CALL :mytee "copying cm scripts" FOR %%A in (src fpgaInclude include mfaInclude msgInclude nsiInclude control_files c_code) DO ( mkdir %%A& CALL :mytee "making %%A directory" copy %viewpath%%%A\* %thumb_dr%:\nearfield\%%A& CALL :mytee "copying %%A directory files" ) CALL :mytee "End of program" GOTO :EOF :mytee echo %~1 echo . echo %~1>>%logfile% echo .>>%logfile% GOTO :EOF jaclaz

Check The status of the device. It may have a status 19 or 24. Often it is due to some "lower" or "upper" filters installed in the Registry, some "virtual" drive drivers have been reported as being the cause, as well as "proprietary" USB drivers: http://www.msfn.org/board/USB-storage-devi...er-t121254.html http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html (I am assuming that we are talking about devices that are seen as "Mass Storage Devices") It could as well be a hardware problem, but since I presume that your devices work on other PC's, I doubt it: http://www.msfn.org/board/Win-XP-Drive-t122391.html There are possibly limits in the number of devices (entries in the Registry) that you can connect on a given PC, but they should not apply on "normal" use (as an example where this may happen, "public" PC's like that on Universities to which thousands of USB sticks may be connected). jaclaz

My personal opinion, is that UNLESS the job is for a technical consultant in a data recovery or forensics company, the question and the way it is posed would not be appropriate: it would, if answered correctly only discriminate about the candidate "geekness" . To the question: Q. Here is a corrupted excel file, what can you do to recover it's contents? The correct answer is NOT: A1. Nothing, you should have a backup of it before corruption. (which noone in his right mind would give in a job interview , as it hints that the Company has bad backup practices or that the interviewer is a jerk) And is NOT even: A2. Sure, no problem, let me have a look at it in my hex editor, give me a couples of hours and I'll get the data. (which is reserved to the very few people that can actually fix a corrupted Excel datasheet with a hex editor, otherwise is either presumptuous or a bluff) The "right" answer is actually a question: A3. Sure, how much I am allowed to spend in consulting fees to recover this valuable data? I will start researching a suitable solution as soon as I have a budget. If you wish to "insist" in the question, meaning it is aimed to test actual knowledge in the use of Excel, I would rather use "address" corruption in formulas, something that an advanced Excel user should be able to fix. By fiddling with VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, ADDRESS, INDIRECT functions, and inserting or removing a column within the lookup range, you can easily make an otherwise "perfect" spreadsheet become a mess. jaclaz

At the time, Windows 95 was fast with 32 Mb, and Windows 98 was fast with 96 Mbytes, so the 128 Mbyte should not be a problem. The microdrive, being a CF card type, is pin-compatible with IDE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash So, I guess that the "complication" would be using the "added layer" of USB interface, is there a reason for it? However, you need a very reduced Windows 9x, rather than a "full" system. Did you try the Winimize project? http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showforum=53 http://www.winimize.com/ An hypothetical size for the needs you have should be below 35÷40 Mb in size, thus it would be possible to load it and run it in RAMDISK or using grub4dos mapping. jaclaz

Exactly my point. jaclaz

I have some perplexities on the "extent" of the "free" related to imagex used as an imaging tool/backup: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...9355&st=134 jaclaz

@earlytv There are several ways to boot a Windows 98. (there is more than one way to skin a cat) Can you post what is your final goal, setting for a moment what you heard aside, and giving some more details on the PC you want to run 98 on? Amount of RAM, BIOS used, whether it supports booting at USB 1.1 or 2.0 spped, whether it uses EHCI, OHCI or UHCI USB controller, etc.? And what use you will put this install PC at? If you have enough RAM, most probably using a RAMdisk would be the easiest. Just to give you a hint, and something to read, not necessarily the solution you are looking for: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=2267 @cannie You are a candidate for testing PLoP: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmngrusblog.html jaclaz

Yes, if the infection is "smart" enough, it won't let you install a scanning engine without attempting to modify it, and if the Anti-virus is "smart" enough won't let anything modify it's own files and will fail the install. A good CATCH 22 situation. Scanning the system off-line using a dos, linux or PE based bootdick/CD/DVD is the way to go. jaclaz

Just for the record: 1) it is possible, though NOT recommended, NOT easy, possible at the moment manually only, taking a lot of time and prone to errors, to change a drive letter for the "boot" partition http://www.msfn.org/board/Change-Boot-Driv...art-t90495.html Kids, don't do this at home 2) the problem of "mixing" drive letters on new installs can be resolved by using the migrate.inf file: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758337.aspx http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19663 As in everything in this field, accurate planning before partitioning/installing/adding drives is essential. jaclaz

If I may, wheel (and hot water) have already been invented. Here: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=334 http://mbldr.sourceforge.net/ http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=162108 Now, making the wheel rounder (and hot water hotter) may be a great accomplishment , though 512 bytes, actually: 512-2-(4*16)-4= 458 bytes (whole size-magic number-4*partition entries-2K/XP/2003/Vista disk signature) are a rather smallish environment for adding featires. Cheers, jaclaz

Thanks for the invitation, but unfortunately Chinese is very difficult for western eyes (at least mine). May I invite you , since you appear to know English, here? : http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4661 jaclaz

Of course the .wim needs to be mounted, how would you access it's contents otherwise? Maybe you should use one of the GUIS available: http://www.autoitscript.com/gimagex/ http://www.msfn.org/board/GImageX-and-WIMM...ls-t107920.html http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20706 http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=3001 But, no offence whatever intended , you appear to have not yet fully grasped the theory behind the use of .wim images. If I may give you some advice: You should re-study the available documentation and online one, start here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721929.aspx Initially do try building normal, simple deploying images, to get the hang of the procedure, and only later introduce variations, unattended install, partitioning and the like. I suspect that at the moment you are attempting to have "everything an now" without being sufficiently familiar with the basics. jaclaz

It seems like the myths: 1) it is not possible to install XP on USB devices 2) well, you can, but it won't be portable are die-hard ones. In a nutshell: 1) it is possible to install XP on partitioned USB devices 2) it is possible, with a few shortcomings, to make it portable between different machines Points of note are: 1) the procedure is DEFINITELY complex, outside the "reach" of the average user, as it needs a deep knowledge of the internals and lots of tweaking/troubleshooting, exception made for the "automated" way supplied by the said USBOOT.ORG, which, if it works on your particular hardware, is reletively simple 2) Nonetheless, once having a build successfully running on a given PC, modifying it to make it "portable" has to be done manually and is as well fairly complex. 3) unless you have a VLK license, it may be an infringement of the EULA, expecially in the case of OEM licenses 4) it might be necessary to use files from beta's (like LONGHORN) or from other Microsoft products, like Server 2003 or XP embedded, which again, without an appropriate VLK or specific license, may constitute an infringement of the EULA jaclaz

What you report is strange. By setting the BIOS properly and using the standard HAL it should be possible to install NT 4.00 allright. The problems you may found would more be in the motherboard integrated devices drivers for which a NT 4.00 driver may be not available, but using "default" drivers should be possible to make it work, although without the speed optimization that specific drivers may give. However you're right, though I think it is possible, it would be a lot of troubleshooting work needing a huge numbers of attempts and probably not worth the effort. About Virtual Machines, do yourself a favour, forget about Virtual PC and try Virtualbox: http://www.virtualbox.org/ it is definitely faster. jaclaz

surfetje, there is no need to quote entire previous posts, it only makes the topic pretty much unreadable. About the where to put diskpart.txt, try to look at it from another angle, when the startnet.cmd will be executed, at a certain point it will call diskpart.exe, and diskpart.exe will call diskpart.txt (without any drive/path specified). Isn't the answer easy? Diskpart.txt must be anywhere it can be found by diskpart.exe at the time it will run, i.e. in the same directory as startnet.cmd, which, as detailed in the given link, should be %SYSTEMROOT%\System32 of the image. I have no idea how you are mounting the .wim image, and what do you mean by "d:\wds\mount\startnet.cmd (path where i mounted boot.wim)" and "c:\diskpart.txt" Maybe we are using different "terms", but I really do not understand what you mean. jaclaz

Cannot say if this is the problem, but this: should be: See this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295299/en-us jaclaz

Good. For the record, when we are talking of file association, this can come handy: http://www.xs4all.nl/~wstudios/Associate/ jaclaz

I am not sure I actually can. I am failing to see what your question actually is. Do you already have a startnet.cmd? Read this first thing: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766521.aspx startnet.cmd is a simple batch file (under NT/2K/XP/2003 batch files can have both the .bat or .cmd extension, the latter is the "proper" one) that is autoexecuted, you may think at it like the old AUTOEXEC.BAT of DOS/Win9x/Me. It is a plain TEXT .txt file (that you can make with Notepad) with it's extension changed to .cmd. Any batch command inside the startnet.cmd is executed. You either add the said line to an existing startnet.cmd or you create with notepad a new file named startnet.cmd adding to it that line. The said line: will call DISKPART.EXE with the /S parameter (which makes diskpart parse a Script file) and feed to it the name of such a file: FILE.TXT FILE.TXT, with the contents seen before is a simple sequence of commands, that diskpart will execute, exactly as if they were given one by one on command line. jaclaz

Maybe not what you want to hear, but there is a Win32 port of "dd" here: http://gmgsystemsinc.com/fau/ That should support stdin and that can use lznt1 compression that is the same (or very similar to the) one that is used in NTFS compression, thus if not the "tightest" in the world, pretty much fast. jaclaz

Oh, come on , get grub4dos (which grldr can be called from BOOT.INI) and you are free to install almost ANY OS, without losing any kind of compatibility with NTLDR/BOOT.INI/NTDETECT.COM: http://grub4dos.jot.com/WikiHome https://gna.org/projects/grub4dos/ The 0.4.3 2008-05-14 is a very good and stable release. The 0.4.4 2008-08-06 should be the last tested one, do not use any other version if not needed or for experiments. Guide here: http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/Grub4dos.htm The chapter that should mainly interest you: http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/...all.htm#method3 jaclaz

Maybe there is another way through APPS.INF. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138410/en-us APPS.INF has an empty entry for COMMAND.COM: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/130971/en-us Would something like this work?: [COMMAND.COM] Disable=win or [COMMAND.COM] Enable=dos Disable=win And maybe also playing with the "aen" and "lie" switches.... jaclaz