jaclaz

Hmmm...., I don't think it's possible, but you can try to experiment lowering the value of in BOOT.INI, a value of 0 should be equal to "directly" boot the default OS, but maybe, just maybe, if you press the [DOWN ARROW] key at the right time, you might be able to select the other entry. With a value of 1, you will be able to use the key, but the BOOT.INI screen will probably be visible too much time for your tastes. A possible alternative, for Ghost recovery, cannot say if it is possible to extend it use to other situations, is this rather complex procedure: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=18480 but it involves using a third party bootmanager, drive won't be "standard" anymore. More similar reference: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=47773 http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/ jaclaz

Now I see. Nice trick, I always directly edit boot.ini post-install with Notepad, I would have never thought of this, but I can see the usefulness of it. jaclaz

@E-66 As I see it, keeping things as "standard" as possible, unless something "different" is REALLY required, is always advisable. And the thought of being able to fix things with a simple DOS/Win9x floppy or bootCD, should always been taken into account. What I would do in your case: 1) Have the Primary Active partition formatted as either FAT16 or FAT32 (to have maximum compatibility), this is a solution I use since more than 10 years, and experience confirmed the usefulness of such a setup, see this: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...mp;#entry581401 2) Install WinXP normally in one of the Logical Volumes inside Extended Partition 3) Download Grub4Dos from here: http://grub4dos.jot.com/WikiHome extract from it the grldr file and copy it to the Primary partition (drive C :\ ) 4) Copy and paste the following in Notepad and save it as menu.lst (again on drive C :\ ): [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect C:\GRLDR="Grub4Dos" As you see, you didn't modify anything in the MBR nor in the bootsector, you only added a boot option to the "standard" NTLDR/BOOT.INI boot process. The two entries in menu.lst allow you to either go back to the "standard" NTLDR/BOOT.INI (should you change your idea) or to boot from DOS/Win9x files. Till now nothing really new, the same can be done easily with the help of Bootpart: http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm and just the standard NTLDR/BOOT.INI But if you read the Grub4Dos documentation (actually at the moment rather scarce) and if you go to the 911CD Forum and search on it for posts with "Grub4Dos" in them to get some ideas and hints, you will soon find out the enormous potentiality you have in your hands, here are a few good starts: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...c=18838&hl= http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...c=18045&hl= http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...c=18846&hl= A few basic examples: You install a BartPE on C :\ ?, just add this in menu.lst: title BartPE find --set-root /minint/setupldr.bin chainloader /minint/setupldr.bin You have floppy boot disabled in BIOS? Just add this: # This simply boots a floppy disk from your # physical floppy drive. title Boot Floppy on (fd0) chainloader (fd0)+1 rootnoverify (fd0) You have CD boot disabled in BIOS? # This simply boots a CD from your # physical CD drive. # Cd must be a BootCD of course title Boot CD on (cd) root (cd) chainloader (cd) You want to boot from a Ghost (super)floppy image?: # This is how you boot a floppy image # stored on a FAT/FAT32 partition. # Replace ghost.img to whatever image you desire to boot. title Boot Ghost 2003 (ghost.img) find --set-root /ghost.img map --mem /ghost.img (fd0) map --hook chainloader (fd0)+1 And the above are just a few of the possibilities..... jaclaz

Things that come to my mind (pardon me if they are too "basic" for your level of knowledge): 1) Incorrect BIOS settings (need to set HD detection to "AUTO" or manually change it to the right drive) 2) Incorrect master/slave or CS setting on the drive(s) (check jumpers) 3) Bad cable(s) (try with another one) 4) Incorrect connection of the cables, if they are the 80 conductor ones Master and slave are coded as "black" and "grey" respectively, while Motherboard side is "blue": http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html 5) Conflict with the "other" CD drive (disconnect it temporarily) As a side note, and as a general rule, when Ghosting or however transferring large amounts of data between hard disks, having them on two different IDE channels is a good idea, to avoid possible bottlenecks on the single channel. jaclaz

Yes. If you are quite confident that the MBR and the first few sectors of the HD have not been corrupted you can make a copy of them with dd under linux and later restore them with either dd for windows: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite/dd.htm or the DSFOK toolkit: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/ I don't remember how many sectors grub uses, but if you backup the first 63 sectors you are on the safe side. An alternative could be using the grldr from Grub4dos to chainload Linux from the "normal" NTLDR/BOOT.INI: http://grub4dos.jot.com/WikiHome jaclaz

No, actually it is the other way round, though, probably, for your use the 800dpi is enough. A higher dpi (i.e. resolution or density) of the sensor means that the sensor can appreciate a SMALLER movement, as an example if you move your mouse one inch: on a 800 dpi mouse: the movement will be "sensed" as 800/800=1" on a 1600 dpi mouse (I am using 1600 just to simplify the math): the movement will be "sensed" as 1600/1600=1" So, NO difference. But if you continue the movement a very little bit and then reverse it: the 800 dpi mouse will "toggle" between 1" and 1"+1/800 the 1600 dpi mouse will ALSO pass through the value 1"+1/1600 while going between 1" and 1"+2/1600 (=1"+1/800) The actual movement of the mouse is translated into movements of the cursor on the screen with a ratio (adjustable via the driver settings, and for the sake of the reasoning, not taking into account acceleration settings), just as an example the same 1" movement of the mouse produces, say, a 4" movement of the cursor, i.e. the ratio is 1:4. If you have a 17" monitor (diagonal measure), the actual screen (viewable area) will be roughly (WxH) 13"x10", so, in the case of a vertical movement, the minimum amount you can move the cursor becomes: 10"/4/800=1"/240 with the 800dpi and 10"/4/1600=1"/480 with the 1600dpi Of course, if you lower the ratio you get more precision of the cursor (but you need wider movement of the mouse), whilst if you increase it, you "lose" precision (but you move less the mouse). So, given that the 800dpi is enough in normal use, you can see the increased precision of the 2000dpi as a way to put less strain on the hand using the mouse OR being able to work on smaller mousepad with the SAME sensitivity OR being able to work with enough precision on an image without magnifying it on the screen too much (provided that your eyesight is good enough ) while being able to quickly move the cursor on the menu or toolbars. Another factor that should be taken into account, as said, is the ability to separately set resolution in the x and y directions, and more generally, the quality of the driver. (in this case related to wideness of settings and "response" to them) Moreover, not all hands are the same, you might find a particular shape of the mouse as very comfortable while I might find the same one making me hold the hand or fingers at awkward angles.... Sampling rates (i.e. the number of times the sensor is actually read per second) should not be a problem for Photoshop use, while of course is very important for gaming where mouse movements are FAST. jaclaz

...and may I ask what this has to do with boot.ini? Thread title: jaclaz

Sorry, I don't want to worsen the already made confusion on terms, but actually some of the above concepts appear to be incorrect. An Active partition is one that has a "bootable" flag in the MBR. This means that only Primary partitions can be made bootable. When you boot the BIOS looks in the MBR of first drive and search for bootcode on the partition marked as bootable in the MBR, see here: http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/principles.htm A "Logical Partition" should be more properly referred to as "Logical Volume inside Extended Partition". The Extended Partition has an entry in MBR that redirects to the EMBR where the actual entries for the Logical Volumes (read Logical Partitions) are. As long as a proper bootloader (in NT/W2K/XP/2003 NTLDR+NTDETECT.COM+BOOT.INI) resides on an active primary partition, it can boot a system (the /WINNT or /WINDOWS folder) residing on ANY accessible partition, regardless it is primary or logical. On the other hand, as a very simple "security feature", you can have a disk with no active (and not even primary) partitions and boot from a removable device such as a floppy or USB stick, where these bootloader files are: http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm If you install, INSTEAD of the "Standard" MBR code a BOOTMANAGER, you can also boot some Operating Systems (including NT/W2K/XP/2003) directly from a Logical volume, if you fix the hidden sectors with the correct values: http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/ http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/ptedit.htm The easiest way to setup a disk for single boot or simple multiboot (and to a certain extent, as I see it, the safer) is the way E-66 suggested, check also this posts of mine: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?s=&showtopic=47182 http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=33964 jaclaz

Thanks for the heads up! jaclaz

Well, it was an easy one, happy it worked. jaclaz

And as a corollary a quick FAT16 vs FAT32 vs NTFS table: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm I have read somewhere that on both Win9x and NT/2k/XP cluster size should be 4 kb (as in NTFS) because it matches the size of a "page" on I386 architecture. Bigger sizes appear to slow performance less than smaller ones. It seems like the new "standard sector" size will be 4,096 bytes instead of 512: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=6076 Doc: http://www.idema.org/_smartsite/modules/lo...ta_file_id=1259 jaclaz

In my opinion the G7 is not even comparable to the MX, it has far superior resolution and besides it appears to have a spare battery: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products...CONTENTID=10716 and independent x/y sensitivity, that could be quite useful. It's not cheap, though. jaclaz

The arcpath in second entry in first boot.ini appears to be incorrect, should actually be: Check this: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=25365 and links therein, basically if you use the "multi" syntax like in multi(X)disk(Y)rdisk(Z)partition(W)\<winnt_dir> X and Y are ALWAYS 0 (zero) Z is the number of the disk (first disk is 0) and W is the number of partition (first partition is 1) jaclaz

Here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=69211&hl= Another tutorial here: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...c=18045&hl= jaclaz

Not on XP, but yes, on Win2K I managed to do it. The key step is doing the changes in kb249321 BEFORE those in kb223188. Of course the later "search and replace" in the registry has to be carried on with a minimun of patience and attention..... jaclaz

Well, no, it was tricky but it could be done: jaclaz

Something you could try is an alternate wnaspi32.dll: http://www.frogaspi.org/index.html http://www.frogaspi.org/products/frogaspi/faq.htm http://www.frogaspi.org/download.htm#frogaspi jaclaz

You don't "get" an .iso, you "get" an application to "build" one. BartPE: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ WinPE: (if eligible) from Microsoft Reatogo: http://www.reatogo.de/ Winbuilder: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/forums.html The easiest, that you should try first, is ubcd4win: http://www.ubcd4win.com/ jaclaz P.S.: Sorry dexter, cross-posting...

Ponch, sorry , I did not mean in any way that you are false or that what you said is literally false, maybe you just did not look hard enough. I didn't want people reading the thread think that it is impossible to do it. Bart Lagerwej, the author of BartPE, clearly states that BartPE is intended to be a Not for installing it to hard disk. However he gives the peinst.cmd as a plugin (used to be pehdinst): http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/faq/#9 http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/pluginhelp/peinst.htm that makes exactly that, but since it is not the main "scope" of BartPE, peinst.cmd has some limits. The option is still there (BartPE 3.110a, in the plugin folder), and people on the 911CD forum have found ways to better and "widen" the usage of PE on HD with their own tricks. About the fact that BartPE needs it's own partition, since peinst adds an entry to boot.ini, I cannot see where you get that piece of info. jaclaz

And, just for the record: Is completely false. It is perfectly possible to install BartPE on hard disk, and there is no need to have a songle partition for it on the disk, you will need a bootmanager like Grub4DOS, that's all. You might want to read these: http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?show...c=11150&hl= http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...c=18045&hl= http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?show...c=11226&hl= and generally search on the 911cd forums for more. However PE (being it BartPE, Microsoft WinPE, Reatogo, winbuilder HojoPE or similar) is NOT XP, it is a PE (Pre-install Environment) that can be tweaked to "look and feel" like XP. It has resource and time LIMIT and needs no activation. jaclaz

Yes, that's most probably how it will turn out. In a perfect word, people would NOT buy from MS because of DRM, and MS would be forced to remove it. I'm sure that the difference between the two "methods" to achieve the same final goal is evident. jaclaz

Well, EITHER that OR Microsoft doesn't listen to Customers..... jaclaz

Life. You will find out soon that same things happened as well 2000 years ago, have already been "coded", and, by knowing the past, you can try not to repeat the same errors.. Some internet results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.g. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=989106 http://www.answers.com/topic/festina-lente http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapere_aude For the missing ones, you might want some help from a friend or professor that knows Latin... jaclaz

Hey people, why everybody doesn't try to take it easier? This thread was started by a guy who did his best NOT to start yet another flamewar. This same discussion with exactly the same arguments has taken place n times on the board, and noone was ever able to talk another into changing his mind about Windows 98 or XP. So, what's the need of it? Why everyone doesn't go on playing with the OS, filesystem or hardware of his choice without trying to interfere with what other people are doing? And here is my take on this (in one of the n threads): http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?s=&amp...st&p=305464 jaclaz

hmmm, if I may, you might need to integrate your studies with some latin classics, in my opinion you could get some interesting points of thoughts from them, here is a good start: jaclaz