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.

Thanks for the move cluberti I'm aware that the system's overhead is bigger than on x86 systems, but those are limited to 3GB per app, so gaining that 1GB is very well worth it 7z Unless you have at least 12GB in your system, you just can't ever have enough for that app Well I only saw two VistaPE and Win7PE and both seem to be way bloated. I'm more looking for something like PicoXP. Yeah, I did. In fact I asked there first a few days ago under my other nick "nanaga". The projects I tried weren't compatible with my Windows versions, that's why I made my own PE x64. Also, it's noteworthy to say that no PE over there offers such a minimalistic approach for x64-systems as PicoXP does for x86. LiveXP might be able to do it, but I couldn't test it yet due to mentioned issues. Anyway, I have a PE 1.x now and it works nicely. The problem is, that Windows seems to lock more memory the more the system has available. For example, I can run my PE on a 112MB virtual machine (this is the absolute minimum. The OS will take like 50MB under these conditions. If I raise the memory to 1GB it eats 150MB and on my 4GB machine it occupies 400MB for no good reasons. If I could eliminate the culprit which bloats Windows so dynamically that would already help and I could use my current PE instead of making a new one. Since I don't think it's possible, I want to strip Windows 7 down to its bare Winmin bones. Even if Winmin behaves similarly to XP, occupying more space as more space is accessible, I could still make use of a pagefile, which might help compensate that behavior. While PE 1.x only supports pagefiles on systems with 64MB RAM and less, this is a native feature of WIN PE 2 and 3, so using those would have advantages in any case. Seeing that Eric Traut mentioned Windows 7's Winmin roots in his presentation made me wonder that no one yet tried to strip Windows down to expose the core. I can't believe that I'm the first one trying that.

Yes, I'm using 4GB RAM. If I only had 3GB, I'd use Freedos, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent for x64 users. Edit: This thread might be more appropriate in the WinPE-section.

I'm trying to get the most out of my RAM for some command line tools. I ran XP x64 and Win 7 x64 only as command prompt in safe mode, but they still consumed up to 400MB of RAM. I created a minimalistic PE based on Server 2003 x64, but the memory usage was comparable to that of the safe mode's command prompts. Seeing that Microsoft made use of componentizing by using Minwin in Win7, I wondered if there was a way to strip down a PE x64 or the safe mode to a similar performance. It's all about lowering the RAM requirements for me. All I need is a bootable x64 command shell with really low requirements. I found the registry settings for the safe mode and already started experimenting with kicking out several drivers and services. However, I'd prefer having a seperate PE available instead of butchering the life line of my Windows. Any ideas, programs, tools or informations you might have heard of that would help me in my endeavor?

Right-click on the O&O-service and start it manually. Check it's properties and set it to automatic install and reboot. If that still doesn't help then I'd contact O&O. If you purchased the software, then it's their duty to care about their customers. If you don't limit yourself to a single program, then you might want to check out other defrag-programs. If I remember correctly then O&O is the only one that uses services to connect to the hard drives. Others don't have that extra possible obstacle.

I voted for Disktrix' Ultimate Defrag. It is the best defragmentation software there is and here's why: All other defraggers usually only offer pre-defined sorting modes. While UD has those too, you can define your own additionally. This makes it the most powerful software there is. For normal users I usually recommend Raxco's Perfect Disc and O&O, however, I was disappointed with their latest packages. They're bloated and offer little in terms of efficiency. Also, they suck defragging huge files on really cluttered up hard drives. I used them on a 300GB HDD before and they just gave up on the biggest files. Even worse, they sorted the files in a totally inefficient manner without giving me the option to influence that. Whoever remembers SpeedDisk from Norton Utilities for Win95 knows that this great program already offered personal sort options, so why can't these overpriced, bloated other software packages offer that? Anyway, Disktrix has no problem with big files on almost filled up hard drives at all. I tested it on a 500GB HDD filled with 1GB+ sized files with a fragmentation degree of 85% and with about 5% of free space. It managed to defrag the hdd completely. Only a single file was left in 2 fragments. After seeing Raxco and O&O giving up on a much easier task, I was pretty impressed. Furthermore, UD not just allows for personal sort orders, it also allows for special file placement to make use of a hard drives slow and fast parts. This is an essential option that no other defragger that I tried offered. Using this option, I was able to boost the boot up speed of a 6 year old Notebook with WinXP on it from 2 minutes to just 25 seconds (it has a very slow HDD). Add the fact that UD is one of the smallest and sleakest defraggers and you have a great program. It also supports boot time defrag, which is a rare feature and it allows for defragging the MFT, which is even rarer. Afaik, hardly any other tool does that.

Wow, that is a very nice offer! Thanks a lot, but thankfully I just found a little app called RamStatus which just works nicely, just as I had hoped. Thanks again for your offer and also for all the other suggestions you guys sent. They will be useful to me in the future

Thanks a lot for these suggestions! I never used WMIC for that, but this going to be my new way to invoke this information from command line now. However, this still doesn't work for what I have in mind. I guess I should have been more specific. I'm using a super slim command shell-only XP x64. There are no bells and whistles like WMIC left to use, so I need a standalone application that is absolutely independent from most Windows components.

Thank you for your quick reply I never heard of PowerShell, but it sure looks useful and it might come in handy in my future endeavors. For this one, however, it doesn't work. It relies on Net Framework 2.0. I need a standalone tool which can run on a minimal Windows without the need for much overhead. PowerShell seems to be the exact opposite of having no overhead. So far, I used pmon.exe for getting some status reports on RAM-usage. It's a 10kb command line executable. Easy to use and very small with basically no requirements. Too bad that there is no x64-version of it. So I hope to find a similarly small and easy tool for x64 systems.

I'm looking for an x64 command line tool that can output an operating system's free RAM. So far I've been using pmon.exe for that job, but this is a 32bit one and I can't use it on a x64-only system. So does anyone know of an x64-replacement? Does anyone know where to find a whole bunch of native x64 command line tools for other purposes?

I know, I used that switch too. In fact, I already posted earlier in this thread that CDimage and OSCDimg can create valid UDF-bridges. I can see that you don't use any sort order, which is the most crucial thing when booting more than just a couple of operating systems. I needed to boot 6 entries for example which didn't work with CDimage's native way of sorting files (at least not all of them). Cdimage 2.54 and OSCDimg 2.55 support sort-files but seem to be buggy as building an image takes hours, so mkisofs ftw.