Mexxi

No, I'm not sure. I wasn't able to specify my hard drive in a way ntfsundelete supported. I tried c:, /dev/hda, /dev/hda1, /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 - no success. Through google I found a post of an XP user who had the same issue and someone replied that SATA wasn't supported yet. The port is from 2004, so that might explain it. The XP user also said that compiling ntfsprogs with cygwin made the whole thing work. Before going through the hassle of recompiling the toolset myself I'd rather try to find another (preferably cygwin based) windows version (there must be several according to wikipedia) or - as a last resort - use a live CD. I'm not too Linux savvy, so this is my least favorite choice, plus the live CD allen2 suggested doesn't seem to like EasyBCD's ISO boot and doesn't boot successfully. However, I heard every Ubuntu live CD has ntfsprogs pre-installed, so I'll give those a shot before I give up on finding a working windows version. Update: I got around trying ntfsundelete. Excellent tool, however, it does not support restoring files without copying them. The "undelete inode" option is a bit misleading here. In fact, you have to specify a destination directory or else ntfsundelete will copy the file to the current user directory by default. Still, great tool that I'll certainly use in the future. At least I was able to find out quickly that the file I was trying to restore already had its MFT entry overwritten.

Thanks a lot allen2! I was just looking for a good one to download

Thank you for your reply jaclaz. Excellent advice as always ntfsundelete looks like it does the trick. The windows port doesn't seem to support SATA-discs, so I'll have to dig out a Linux live CD first, but it's finally a solution I almost thought wouldn't exist.

When files are deleted a flag in the MFT is merely changed. I'm trying to find an unerase tool that is capable of changing that flag back without actually copying the file to a different location. I have been testing like a dozen tools and not a single one supports this way of data recovery. If I was still running on FAT, I'd use DOS 6.22's "undelete.exe" since that one actually did it that way, but I'll be damned if there isn't a modern equivalent. Does someone happen to know a tool that supports recovering a file without actually copying its content to a new location?

You should have attached the specific error messages instead. They give a good hint which part of your setup failed. I doubt anyone here can make sense of the mini dumps.

With 16GB RAM there shouldn't be a need for a swap file. My system sports 4GB and also runs on Windows 7 without a pagefile. I also slimmed my OS down with vlite. The Memory footprint after a fresh install is 530MB...small enough even for comps with less RAM. I used the same vlited version on an old Laptop of mine with 1GB RAM, also without pagefile and it worked well enough. Sometimes the system would throw messages that it was lacking enough memory, but after upgrading to 1.5GB I never saw any of those again, even when using lots of RAM-intense office apps. The VM will eat the most RAM on your machine. I don't know how many VMs you plan on running and how much memory you want to assign to each of them, but imagine your system would have to swap gigabytes of memory to hdd. The slowdown would be quite annoying. Anyway, with the small memory footprint of Windows 7 and your huge amount of RAM a swapfile would rather be a step back in performance. So I suggest not using one. If you run into problems you can always enable it, so no reason not to try it without one. Btw, I have been running all my systems without pagefile for the last 8 years and that without having insanely huge amounts of memory despite using memory intense apps.

Not necessarily. If it installs malware then that also has to get through the firewalls. Btw, I mentioned common sense as a major part of my setup. Most exploits are shipped by three means: infected ads, emails and shady websites. I have an excellent ad-blocker which eliminates the first problem. Emails are effectively scanned and filtered before they even reach me and even then I don't open them mindlessly. I also don't visit shady websites, so there's no way to get infected. Never had a virus, a worm, a backdoor app and I also never suffered from an exploit. Never happened in the past 17 years and I doubt it will in the future. Btw, most exploits are executed through IE and ActiveX, so not using that is a major step to not suffering from exploits.

Thanks for your reply. It neither works in balanced nor power saver.

I never used the update feature in any Windows version. Never had any problems. Also never had those that would have been solved by those updates. As for security: I have firewalls running in two cascaded routers and use common sense to eliminate the weakest link in the whole system: the user. This is of course not recommendable to inexperienced users, but if you know your way around and also don't have any instabilities or problems that require updates, then there's no reason to waste hdd space and precious time on this feature.

Looks like you're using the 32bit version of Windows and that one's limited to 4GB RAM

I'm running Windows 7 x64 on an Asrock K10N78 and I just can't for the life of me get CnQ to work. It has been enabled in the BIOS and CPU speed and multiplier have been set to auto. I even used my BIOS' power saving profile - to no avail. I have also set the energy schemes in Windows appropriately, but all I get instead of "Minimum/Maximum Processor State" is "System Cooling Policy". May be I'm missing a certain service that is required by CnQ? I tried activating all disabled services, but to no avail. Does anyone have an idea what I might still be missing?

Indeed, I forgot about that part of asymmetry True and fortunately most symmetric archivers are actually capped. I don't know of one that uses more than 2GB RAM. Asymmetric ones like 7z and FreeArc do go beyond that, but thanks to their asymmetric algorithms, even an archive with a 1GB dictionary in 7z can be extracted on all modern machines.

Asymmetry describes the behavior of decompression being performed faster than compression. This has nothing to do with increasing compression efficiency by using bigger dictionaries. Anyway, the best compression efficiency can be reached if the dictionary size matches the combined size of the files that have to be compressed. 256MB is rather small if you compare it to many compressible sources such as images, games, backups etc. So an increase in dictionary size is not necessarily only useful for outstanding compression jobs. Many run-in-the-mill archives can profit from it. Thanks a lot! That was a very valuable clue! I created a profiled WinPE 3.0-image and RAM-usage is already lower than that of the command prompt of XP x64's Safe Mode.

Everything and nothing. I'm just into testing different compression algorithms and programs and maxing them out, but I also have some projects going on that require maximum compression and profit massively from bigger dictionaries, such as installers. Anyway, who wouldn't like better compression without having to upgrade the computer? Also it's not like the 256MB dictionary size you get on 4GB machines is anywhere near enough. The most efficient dictionary-size equals file size and nowadays files tend to be a lot bigger than that, so any improvement can have a major impact.

My PE doesn't work as a RAMDISK. I used Microsoft's deployment tools and they don't activate RAMDISK-functionality automatically. At least judging from the help-file.