nmX.Memnoch

Here ya go...compare the numbers in these two reviews. This should help you make up your mind if you really want to pay the price premium for a 74GB Raptor. Western Digital Raptor WD740GD Review Western Digital Caviar WD2500KS Review I am not sure if the 250GB drive review was done on a system with a SATAII controller that supports NCQ/TCQ though. However, at the beginning of the article they state that the WD2500KS doesn't support NCQ anyway. Be sure to check out the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 line as well. I've read good things about them as well. We have some here at work for our workstations but haven't installed them yet.

Well...being that the Raptors are SATA150 (150MB/s) and the Caviar SE16 is SATA II (300MB/s)....yeah, it should be faster. The 16MB cache will also help quite a bit. Plus, the largest size Raptor you can get is 74GB.

Importing them during install using CMDLINES.TXT imports the settings to the Default User profile. That way it's automatically applied to every new user that logs onto the machine. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

No, it won't because the user account SIDs will be different. On the first install you would end up with, for example:D:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\ D:\Documents and Settings\All Users\ D:\Documents and Settings\Default User\ D:\Documents and Settings\JoeBlowDomainUser\ A reinstall would leave the original folder, however it will create a new profile for the user. You'll end up with things like: D:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.computername\ D:\Documents and Settings\All Users.computername\ D:\Documents and Settings\Default User.computername\ D:\Documents and Settings\JoeBlowDomainUser.domainname\ The profiles from the previous install will still be left intact...they just won't be used. This also happens if you do a reinstall on the C: drive without a reformat.

8 bit = 1 byte 1024 bytes = 1KB 1024KB = 1MB 1024MB = 1GB http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/byte.html http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/k/kilobyte.html http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/m/megabyte.html http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/g/gigabyte.html Newtork transfer rates and drive capacities aren't a direct translation to each other.

Running it from SVCPACK.INF will work...it's just not the recommended way to do it. Running a repair install doesn't recreate the Default User registry hive. You can verify this by checking the creation date/time (not modified) of the NTUSER.DAT in %SYSTEMROOT%\Documents and Settings\Default User\. A repair install is meant to get you back to a working version, not reset everything back to a default install state. Usually repair installs are used to get the system up long enough to backup files and then perform a reinstall. I personally don't trust a system that has had a repair install performed on it after a failure. The failure occurred for a reason.

What I meant by "divide" is actually divide the numbers out...as in with a calculator. I'll use my 250GB drive as an example: Right Way 249,990,901,760 bytes / 1024 = 244,131,740 Kbytes 244,131,740 Kbytes / 1024 = 238409.9 MBytes 238409.9 MBytes / 1024 = 232.8 Gbytes "Wrong" Way (Which most drive manufacturers use) 249,990,901,760 / 1000 = 249990901.76 KBytes 249990901.76 KBytes / 1000 = 249990.9 MBytes 249990.9 Mbytes / 1000 = 249.99 GBytes Does that make more sense?

I'll answer it and the mods can move it if necessary... Create a shortcut with the following target: outlook:Calendar When you do "New Shortcut" it'll automatically make it an Internet Shortcut, which is the type is needs to be for that to work. You can use the outlook: command to make Outlook open into whatever folder you want.

It all depends on who is doing the counting. Windows XP uses the proper 1GB = 1024MB method. However, most drive manufacturers use the improper 1GB = 1000MB method. I have two WD "250GB" drives in my system which WinXP says are 232GB drives...which comes out to 249,990,901,760 bytes. Divide that out using the drive manufacturers way and you'll get ~250GB. Divide that out using the proper way and you'll get ~232GB.

You don't have to put anything in the $OEM$ folder except for CMDLINES.TXT. This is the ONLY way to get HKCU tweaks to apply to all users automatically without creating a custom NTUSER.DAT. I'm pretty sure SVCPACK.INF isn't executed on a repair installation. A repair install simply loads the files back to their default state. If you're using a CD with SP2 integrated then it will load all system files back to their SP2 versions. You then have to run all hotfixes manually.And let's be honest...how many times are you actually having to perform repair installs? If the answer is "a lot" then you have other problems going on besides just worrying about avoiding $OEM$. Another fact is that with a proper unattended CD it can sometimes be just as quick to backup your favorites and documents (which can be avoided if you have a secondary hard drive) and run a quick unattended install. I haven't actually tried it, but I'm also pretty sure that you can still run a repair install on an installation that was installed from an Unattended CD. You just can't do it with the actual Unattended CD...you'd need another CD to boot from that doesn't have any unattended options set (i.e. it has no WINNT.SIF).

It sounds like the information bar is disabled. Try adding update.microsoft.com to your Trusted sites zone to see if that works.

Using the floppy is the quick solution. My system has nothing but SATA hard drives...two 36GB Raptors RAID 0'd and two WD 250GB. It's been working fine from day one.

ALWAYS! Even if they don't think they need it...let THEM delete it. That way it's THEIR fault.

Try this... http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=49320 or this... http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=47647 Or even this... http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?act=Search&f=70

Correct. You can use CMDLINES.TXT without specifying anything in WINNT.SIF. All you need to do is have the file in $OEM$. http://unattended.msfn.org/global/cmdlines.htm The only command I have in my CMDLINES.TXT is .\Install.cmd. I then created Install.cmd to do everything I wanted and put it in $OEM$ along with CMDLINES.TXT. You can run your HKCU tweaks from here.

*bump* I'd like to see how that's done.

I thought that part was understood since he mentioned he was trying to transfer the data to a new machine. But yeah, just to reiterate, be sure to use the recovery software in the new machine with the "bad" drive installed as a slave.

Before doing the format/repartition you can try a utility called RecoverMyFiles to see if you can get any of your files back. It's not free but $70 isn't too much to ask for recovering important data. You can, however, see what it will find with the trial version...you just can't actually recover any files. So grab the trial and see if it'll help you before purchasing a license. If it works be sure not to recover files to the same drive! Doing so takes a chance on overwriting the drive area the program is attempting to recover data from. If the drive is too badly damaged then you may not be able to do anything with it at all. Though I suspect that your partition just got damaged somehow and the drive itself is fine.

One solution to avoid this problem is to install any applications that require HKCU tweaks from CMDLINES.TXT and then apply the reg tweaks right after they're installed. I use this for WMP10, Adobe Reader and one or two other applications. Anything that just applies HKLM settings can be installed from RunOnceEx (or whatever other method you decide to use) with it's HKLM settings applied after install. Some applications put settings in both locations. Grabbing the entire registry key for a given piece of software shouldn't be a problem either (i.e. for Adobe Reader: HKCU\Software\Adobe Reader as well as HKLM\SOFTWARE\Adobe Reader). You don't need all of it for the settings but if you just want to be sure it shouldn't hurt to import the entire thing...as long as the install location is the same on every machine you use the CD for.

Guide for the boot screen Guide for the Setup Billboards There's also a forum dedicated to the setup billboards.

Just so y'all know.... NetBEUI is a protocol that will generate tons of network traffic just talking to itself. It's also a non-routable protocol. It'll work in a pinch but should be avoided if at all possible.

nmX is my clan tag. I'm not sure if you're aware but they even have PC2-8000 now. Run it at the 6400 speeds and you may get better than the 4-4-4-12 timings. Definitely go with a couple of NCQ/TCQ drives. You'll get more bang for your buck.It's hard to pass up a Western Digitial 250GB SATA "II" drive with 16MB cache for $122 shipped.

That depends on the partition size. I haven't tried it but from what I've read 2000 and XP can't format a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB. However I don't know about reading a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB. THAT may be Ed's problem as I know that Win9x/ME could format FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. 2 formats...FAT or FAT32.

That's correct. XP can create, format, read and write FAT or FAT32 partitions. It's recommended to use NTFS, but FAT capability is there. Proof of an example would be that USB thumbdrives come formatted FAT/FAT32 (depending on size). Ed...did you covert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS or run any sort of other partition utilities on it?

It looks like they base their drivers links with a session timeout so you can't link them.... Go to their main page. Select Windows XP from the "Drivers and Software" menu. Click on "Windows XP Drivers and Software" and then select "Notebooks with ATI Graphics" on the next page. And finally select "Catalyst Mobility 5.9 for Windows XP". They don't list Dell in the support section but that doesn't necessarily mean it won't work.