jaclaz

If you are talking about USB Mass Storage Devices, check here: http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html More generally, USBdeview can disconnect USB devices: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html Following is just a guess on my part, but manually running the "New Hardware Wizard" should re-connect it, or maybe one could try manually starting the relevant services with "NET START". jaclaz

Hmmm, is by any chance the hard disk formatted with a partition FAT32? That would explain how the files were properly written (from within Win98) to the hard disk, but later the files were not found. WINNT is ONLY compatible with FAT16 and NTFS (an early version, NOT compatible, unless you have SP4, with later Win2K/XP NTFS). WINNT 4.00 was released BEFORE Windows 95 OSR2, the OS that introduced FAT32. Also, I don't get it. Is the hard drive an IDE one or not? The ST310212A is an IDE/ATA/ATAPI one: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/ata/st310212a.html What is the SCSI controller used for, then? If I guessed right about the FAT32, you are stuck, the only way out would be to recreate an install CD, format with a PROPER filesystem the HD and install from CD: http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/#nt4 Finally, take a deep breath before answering to this: DO YOU OWN A PROPER LICENSE FOR NT 4.00? If not, even if someone would consider NT 4.00 "Abandonware", this is NOT the right place to talk about this, see Rule #1: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=18408 jaclaz

Well actually it is a bit tiring : http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=97137&hl= ...but the (almost) "final" method for #4 is just a few days old, and generally new members take the board more like a "question time" rather than a searchable database of knowledge.... jaclaz

Does the sentence "Search before asking" ring any bell? Here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=97055&hl= and links therein. jaclaz

Though a bit difficult to find, there are 800 and even 900 Mb CD's: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=91905 http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16068 jaclaz

From what you report, it seems to me like you do not need an utility to "format" anything. All you need is an utility to write the correct MBR to the disk, this has nothing to do with "formatting" but rather with "fdisking". You see, a partition image, being an image, ALREADY has (its own) format, including it's bootsector. What you are missing is the MBR and the partition tables within it. If I am not mistaken, GHOST has provisions for this, but not being really familiar with it, I'll suggest you an alternate program (but there are several other ones) to remain on Symantec/Powerquest products : ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_...lities/head.zip You want to use the "MBRUTILD.EXE" program, (there is also a MBRUTIL.EXE for NT/2K/XP): MBRUtil Copyright (c) 2002 PowerQuest Corporation Invalid arguments Usage: MBRutil.exe [/?] [/S[H]=<fileName>] [/R[H]=<fileName>] /S Save MBR (sector 1 only) to <fileName> /SH Save entire first head to <fileName> /R Restore MBR (sector 1 only) from <fileName> /RH Restore entire first head from <fileName> all you have to do is run mbrutild.exe /S PCname.bin to save the MBR when imaging and mbrutild.exe /R PCname.bin when restoring. You can find here: http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/index.html an extensive reference on MBR and bootsectors and links to various freeware tools. jaclaz

@ilko_t Newish release of grub4dos has introduced a couple new commands: This could be the way to introduce "automatic" selection of the grub4dos menu.lst entry during first and second boot. jaclaz

Ambassador, don't take this the wrong way, we are trying to help you, but you must realize that in the sentence: the attributes "wrong", "clearly" and "needed" are just your own opinion on something that you do not actually properly and fully understand (otherwise you won't be here asking for help). There is no way, unless someone here has a properly tuned crystal ball (mine is, alas, in the workshop for maintenance ) to give you an answer without knowing more details. Please do post: A description of your hardware, including make/model of SCSI controller and of hard disks, including their size, etc. The exact steps you took to trying installing NT 4.00. The media you are trying to install from. As a general rule, you can try to install NT 4.00 from DOS usig winnt.exe, rather than from CD, this sometimes help. Also you might want to re-check the limits of NT 4.00 hard disk and partition sizes, maybe something "hides" there: http://www.computing.net/windowsnt/wwwboard/forum/22999.html http://www.ntfaq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=13922 jaclaz

@Idontwantspam If I may, it's a bit aggressive as a reply, as long as you have a proper license, it is PERFECTLY legal to install Windows XP or ANY other software from ANY media. @originalconcept There are several possible ways to install from USB stick. See here the possibilities: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=81788&st=6 Method 1) is FULLY documented and working in the link in the above post. Method 2) can be easily adapted to USB stick from the one described here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=68252 and customized at will, i.e. using Winbuilder instead of BartPE, etc., FULLY working. Method 3) is "on hold", nothing definitive about it. Method 4) has recently been developed to a state where it is working for IDE/ATA equipped PC's, SATA ones appear to be trickier: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...t=0&start=0 with the vital contributions of porear, cdob and ilko_t, here is the FULLY working guide: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...1384&st=128 Method 5) has not yet been tested/developed, due to "hardware requirements" (at least 1 Gb of RAM) jaclaz

Well, then let's make it TWO defective hard drives : jaclaz

Just for the record, and to keep things together as possible, here is an interesting thread on 911CD about using parameters passed to memdisk into autoexec.bat, in case you are using DOS based floppy images: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=5706 just a few days ago the thread was revamped: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19634 with contributions (hopefully enhancements) by d4vr0s and yours truly. jaclaz

From what you report it appears to me like a bad port on the motherboard or a bad cable. Try changing the cable first. Double check that hard disk is properly identified in BIOS, if it's not there is no way you can install/boot from that PC. jaclaz

No, sorry, but the way you describe can potentially lead to much greater problems. There is NO such thing as a "safer" way, as well as there is no "better" way, it all depends on what you need/want to achieve, but using third party bootmanagers, expecially if installed to MBR is, rather obviously, a deviation from "standard" and, as thus, can potentially lead to incompatibilities with other utilities that assume that the given "standard" is respected, statistically this is the MOST RISKY situation you can have. On the contrary, more than 12 years of experience with NT based systems, confirm that installing on a logical volume inside an extended partition, as Gilles Vollant recommends: http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm keeping "standard" MBR and NTLDR, is a VERY safe way. You might want to read this for further considerations: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=33964&st=6 Though this is possible, a word of WARNING is needed, changing the SYSTEM drive letter can (and will) render the system UNBOOTABLE. If you ever want to attempt such, BEFORE doing it, do read this and related links: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=90495 jaclaz

Nothing really universal, unfortunately. Some possibilities exist, though: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=808 jaclaz

Sorry, fly, crossposting. It is perfectly normal, the VALUE of "KEY" is %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\, you need to transform it before: ECHO %KEY% CALL SET KEY=%KEY% ECHO %KEY% jaclaz

I re-checked, the token appears to be 3*, not 2* , however it still does not work with /v syntax @dexter yes, you are right, the line without "delims= " works allright. Can anyone try running this?: @echo off CLS SET KEY= :: delims is a TAB FOR /F "tokens=3* delims= " %%K in ('REG QUERY "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal"') DO SET KEY=%%K ECHO KEY1 IS %KEY% ECHO. SET KEY= FOR /F "skip=4 tokens=2*" %%K in ('REG QUERY "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders" /v Personal') DO SET KEY=%%K ECHO KEY2 IS %KEY% ECHO. SET KEY= FOR /F "tokens=3*" %%K in ('REG QUERY "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal"') DO SET KEY=%%K ECHO KEY3 IS %KEY% ECHO. SET KEY= FOR /F "skip=4 tokens=3*" %%K in ('REG QUERY "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders" /v Personal') DO SET KEY=%%K ECHO KEY4 IS %KEY% ECHO. SET KEY= FOR /F "tokens=2,*" %%K in ('REG QUERY "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders" /v Personal') DO IF %%K==Personal SET KEY=%%L ECHO KEY5 IS %KEY% ECHO. What I get is the following: i.e. "odd" keys (using "my" and "dexter's" code) do work, while "even" ones, based on the /v syntax, do not, #2 gets, as said above the wrong token, #4 gets last item and NOT the right one. jaclaz

No prob, mate. Do report if everything is working as expected.... jaclaz

It DOES look nice , did you try it? jaclaz

hmmm, just for the record, REG.EXE is not "default" on Win2K, you have to install it expressly. However, on my Win2K the /v syntax appears not to be working, this one does: @echo off REM FOR /F "skip=2 delims=~" %%K in ('REG QUERY ^"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders^" /v Personal') DO SET KEY=%%K :: delims is a TAB FOR /F "tokens=3* delims= " %%K in ('REG QUERY "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal"') DO ECHO %%K jaclaz

It seems like those errors appear when something is "not right" with the hard disk: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/271240/en-us More specifically, this seems exactly that error you report: http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboar...rum/164732.html Have a look at this also: http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/ar...05l06/05l06.asp Maybe you can use some switch of Setup to avoid the problem. jaclaz

@All Joc asked me if I could help him in making a dual boot cd with GEEXBOX + XP SETUP. Here is the resulting "HOWTO", GEEXBOX uses the ZFS ISO filesystem, this needs a -z parameter for mkisofs that appears to be somewhat incompatible with XP cd. The workaround is to uncompress the GEEXBOX .iso and re-build it uncompressed, since original .iso is very small, around 8.5 Mb, the uncompressed version is not much bigger, around 9.5 Mb. In the following I used grub4dos, or to be more exact grub4dos's grldr as bootselector, but I guess that making the same with CDshell, BCDW or isolinux should be possible as well. 1) download Geexbox Generator: http://geexbox.org/en/index.html http://www.geexbox.org/releases/1.1-rc2/ge...rc2.i386.tar.gz 2) download grub4dos 0.4.2: http://grub4dos.jot.com/WikiHome http://grub4dos.jot.com/WikiHome/grub_for_dos-0.4.2.zip 3) install generator normally, use it to generate a .iso for your system 4) test the .iso, loop to #3 until you are satisfied with result 5) copy and paste the following into a new file geexbox-generator-1.1-rc2.i386\geexprep.cmd @ECHO OFF CLS ECHO Small batch to extract a GEEXBOX ZFStree to uncompressed tree SET Root_dir=dualboot SET ISO_dir=dualboot\MYISO SET Source_dir=dualboot\origISO\GEEXBOX SET Base_source_dir=dualboot\origISO SET Dest_dir=dualboot\MYISO\GEEXBOX ECHO. ECHO SOURCE tree is %Source_dir% ECHO. ECHO DESTINATION is %Dest_dir% ECHO. PAUSE :START IF NOT EXIST %Root_dir% md %Root_dir% IF NOT EXIST %ISO_dir% md %ISO_dir% IF NOT EXIST %Base_source_dir% md %Base_source_dir% IF NOT EXIST %Source_dir% goto :error IF EXIST %Dest_dir% ( CLS ECHO The directory %Dest_dir% and all it's contents will be erased. RD %Dest_dir% /S ) ECHO NOW the tree will be extracted.... PAUSE tools\win32\mkzftree -u -v %Source_dir% %Dest_dir% PAUSE GOTO :EOF :ERROR ECHO YOU must copy the GEEXBOX folder and all it's contents to \dualboot\origISO\GEEXBOX PAUSE 6) run geexprep.cmd it will prepare the directory tree and exit with an error, ignore it and go on 7) mount the .iso as a virtual CD or however copy the entire Geexbox folder from the working Geexbox CD to \dualboot\origiso\ 8) extract from the grub4dos archive the file grldr to \dualboot\myiso\ 9) copy and paste the following into a new file \dualboot\myiso\menu.lst # Following lines load a splashimage and set text foreground/background colour splashimage /GEEXBOX/usr/share/grub-splash.xpm.gz foreground = 69ee44 background = 337722 timeout 10 default 0 title GEEXBOX kernel /GEEXBOX/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 rw init=linuxrc boot=cdrom remote=atiusb receiver=atiusb keymap=qwerty splash=silent vga=0 video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr initrd /GEEXBOX/boot/initrd.gz title XP SETUP chainloader /I386/SETUPLDR.BIN Please note that these are the settings I needed to use to make Geexbox work on my QEMU, you might want to revise the kernel parameters by checking them against the correspoding ones in \dualboot\myiso\GEEXBOX\boot\isolinux.cfg, here is MY line: APPEND initrd=initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw init=linuxrc boot=cdrom remote=atiusb receiver=atiusb keymap=qwerty splash=silent vga=0 video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr 10) copy and paste the following into a new file geexbox-generator-1.1-rc2.i386\makeiso.cmd @ECHO OFF SET CDTITLE="Dual Boot" SET CDFILENAME="dualboot\MyCD.ISO" SET SOURCE_DIR="dualboot\MYISO" tools\win32\mkisofs -v -iso-level 4 -l -D -d -J -joliet-long -R -volid %CDTITLE% -A GRLDR/MKISOFS -sysid "Win32" -b grldr -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 0x1000 -allow-multidot -hide boot.catalog -o %CDFILENAME% %SOURCE_DIR% 11) run again geexprep.cmd, this time it will give you no errors 12) run makeiso.cmd 13) test the resulting mycd.iso, the option for Geexbox should work as on the original .iso 14) now get your (working) BartPE or XP cd, copy from it the (at least) \I386 directory (and all its contents) to \dualboot\myiso\ 15) copy all the files on the root of the CD to \dualboot\myiso\ 16) run again makeiso.cmd 17) test the resulting mycd.iso, both options should work As always, please do respect my "CAREWARE" license: http://home.graffiti.net/jaclaz:graffiti.net/careware.html and have fun.... jaclaz

FYI, NTFS4DOS (FREEWARE): http://www.free-av.com/antivirclassic/avira_ntfs4dos.html jaclaz

@ilko_t Maybe one could use this method: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=12566 to execute commands when the GUI part starts. In the post it is reported that, while regedit.exe doesn't work in this stage, reg.exe does. jaclaz

(hopefully) some ideas to solve this part of the problem: I doubt that partition table gets corrupt. The MBR code is replaced, that's all. It should be quite easy to work around the problem (from the beginning, INSTEAD of your step #2): 1) DO NOT install grdr.mbr 2) Install normally the XP MBR and bootsector (i.e. do nothing, the HP utility will do it) 3) add to root of the stick GRLDR 4) add to root of the stick NTLDR 5) Add to root of the stick a BOOT.INI like this: [Boot Loader] Timeout=10 Default=C:\GRLDR [Operating Systems] C:\GRLDR="Start GRUB" This way grub4dos is chainloaded through "normal" NTLDR. Also, you don't need to rename setupldr.bin to ntldrstp. jaclaz

Moreover, you can use a CD bootloader like BCDW or grub4dos as no-emulation boot sector of the cd (with grub4dos you can also make the boot floppy). Between its features it has the ability to directly chainload setupldr.bin. Search on the 911CD forum for posts by me (jaclaz), spacesurfer and diddy with keyword "grub4dos", you'll find a number of tutorials and lots of info. jaclaz