JedClampett

I have now made 2 verified copies of the following Recovery Boot disks. Advent 7113 Vista Home Premium (DVD+R) Advent 6415 Combo XP Home Edition (CD-R) I have verified them both twice, and they both boot up OK to the installation screen. The XP edition actually did a full installation, and this was copying from the I386DIST\ folder. I have nuked the HDD on the 6415 again with vivard. Now I understand how to burn bootable Windows restore disks that actually work, I will have a go later at modifying the contents of the Advent 6415 XP ISO, and then rebuild the ISO image to add those missing drivers for the Advent 7096. Any suggestions where to put any files I want to be copied onto the HDD during the recovery procedure please? Thankyou for all the help in getting me this far! Jed

OK - the plot thickens - LOL. I created another Boot ISO for another recovery disk - an Advent 7113 laptop that takes Windows Vista Home Premium. This is a 3 GB DVD image. I then burned the Vista DVD image to the 'faulty' DVD+RW disk, after cleaning my DVD drive laser lens. This TDK DVD is now showing no verify errors, and I also did a second verify of the DVD against the ISO image I burnt the disk from. Again no errors whatsoever. I only use these DVD+RW disks for temporary purposes, like Linux OS installations, and then re-use them to burn a later release of the said OS. So my apologies to TDK I need this Vista recovery disk anyway, as I have 3 Advent 7113 laptops that all have their license stickers for Vista, but only one recovery disk. I'm burning the Vista ISO to a DVD+R disk to save with one of the other 7113 laptops. Next is to try to burn a modified copy of the original Advent 6415 Recovery disk, and see if that will boot up OK. I cannot see why it wouldn't ? Thanks for all the help with this! Jed

I'm confused: How do you make a verbatim copy? How much data holds the rescue DVD? How to write a full DVD to CD? Trust ImgBurn, distrust the media: destroy the media. ..by chance and may cause unpredictable errors in future. Distrust this DVD+RW media in future. Although it says DVD on the disk, it's only 640MB in size, so it fits onto the 700 MB CD-RW fine. Yes - I will trust ImgBurn and seek out some decent media. This is TDK which is supposed to be a good make? I'll check out the DVD/CD reviews on the ImgBurn forum.

Yes - the Copyright Notice when the install starts is SoftThinks 2001. The reason I tried to see if it would boot up OK, is this disk verified OK when using K3b under Linux. So that makes me wonder about other disks I have burnt using K3b that verified 'OK' ?

Thanks jaclaz and cdob for those replies. I have managed to use ImgBurn to successfully make a verbatim copy of the Advent 6415 Combo DVD (it shows as a CD image in ISOBuster or ImgBurn). I burnt it to a 700MB Maxell CD-RW disk OK. Placing that in the Advent 6415 Combo and it boots OK and starts the installation procedure. I guess the next thing to try is to build the ISO image manually in ImgBurn from a directory structure, write that back to this CD-RW, and see if I can boot from that. Update: I have just tried to burn the ISO image that worked on the CD-RW disk to a DVD+RW disk, and I'm getting I/O Error! on the verify cycle. http://i42.tinypic.com/mt41ud.jpg So maybe that media is at fault? Update: Even though the verify for the DVD+RW disk failed, the Advent 6415 is still able to boot from this disk, which could present a problem when running Windows after the installation completes. Jed

I'm using this OEM recovery disk mentioned on this thread: and the link to a picture of the DVD is here: http://oi51.tinypic.com/290v9td.jpg I have created lots of shiny coasters when learning how to burn my own CD/DVD Linux installation disks. So I just practice on DVD+RW disks, which means: 1) They only need to be formatted once. 2) If the burn goes wrong then I don't get another toasted disk. I can just do another test burn again on the same disk. Once I am happy with the resulting test disk, then I would burn it to write-once media, either CD-R or DVD+R. I'll give ImgBurn a try later today, with creating and burning a verbatim copy of this recovery disk, and let you know how it goes. There are 2 boot image files on the Advent 6415 DVD recovery disk: BootCatalog.cat Microsoft Corporation.img Do I need to add the BootCatalog.cat file as well to the new bootable copy? Jed

Thnx again jaclaz. I'm very taken with ImgBurn and have it installed on my Vista laptop OK. Following this IB forum article, it looks like I can do the whole remastering process just using ImgBurn? How to create a Windows XP installation disc (bootable) using ImgBurn http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=11190 Jed

Thanks for those links jaclaz. I'm going to install those programs you sugggested onto my Vista laptop and give it another try at creating a bootable DVD - basically just a cloned boot disk for now. Jed

Thanks jaclaz. I might try again soon on a Vista laptop, using something like Nero to create the ISO file and burn it to disk from there. See if that helps! Jed

Thanks for those replies. I seem to be getting nowhere fast with this I used ISObuster to extract these files from the Advent 6415 DVD: BootCatalog.cat Microsoft Corporation.img I have added those to the dvdrecorder directory that contains the DVD tree. I'm creating and burning the remastered ISO image on Centos 5.7 using this command to create the modified iso image file: #! /bin/bash # ----------------------------------------------------# # create the iso image file # This works OK, and creates the iso verbatim mkisofs -o Advent6415-WinXP-patch1.iso \ -volid Advent6415-WinXP-patch1 \ -sysid LINUX -rational-rock -joliet -joliet-long \ -untranslated-filenames -max-iso9660-filenames \ -b "Microsoft Corporation.img" \ -iso-level 2 \ -no-emul-boot \ -boot-load-size 4 \ ./dvdrecorder exit 0 At the moment I'm testing if I can remaster the original DVD and boot from it - there are no modifications made to it yet. When I try to boot from the new DVD the machine gets stuck after it has output: Searching for Boot Record from CDROM...OK That's as far as it goes. I'm wondering if the boot loader does a md5sum check on the media? This is inside Microsoft Corporation.img file: ... .Error! Could not verify CDROM image. ... Any suggs would be greatly appreciated. It should be OK to create and burn the DVD on Linux, as I have found this post here, about Bootable CD Wizard: http://flz.userdir.org/docs/bcdw/nemkisofs_e.htm

I have an XP Home Edition Recovery Disk for an Advent 6415 laptop, that I would like to remaster for another Advent laptop (a 7096). Is it possible to remaster a recovery disk so I can add the missing drivers for the later model laptop? At the moment XP Home installs onto the 7096 OK, but most of the hardware drivers are missing, even the USB ports and DVD drive will not work, so I have no way to get the missing drivers onto the newer laptop. TIA Jed

Thanks for all the help I've had with this so far. I'm taking another approach with this now. What I'd like to do is to add a hardware detection application to the XP source tree, and burn the new iso to a DVD, then install from the DVD to the advent 7096 laptop. So this is not slipstreaming - just adding something like Device Doctor to the pristine XP Recovery DVD so Device Doctor gets copied to the 7096 HDD. Where in the XP DVD image would I need to place the Device Doctor zip file for it to be copied to the HDD please? Once I can run Device Doctor from the Hard Drive, I can then get the HW ID's for the devices with the missing drivers. Then rebuild the XP DVD again with the missing drivers so they are copied across to the HDD at Recovery Disk runtime. Then the plan is to install those missing drivers from the HDD, and hopefully have a working laptop. Does that sound OK? TIA Jed

Granted, yes. But I'm talking about wiping the whole drive from start to finish - sector by sector - not just the MBR. But this is only if I decide to do a fresh installation of Windows - IIRC the OP wanted to avoid this, and I'm following this thread with much interest. Thanks to all the others that have posted in this thread so far. Surely if the whole drive is wiped - then nothing can survive that?

I'd like to learn all about computer Network Forensics - ideally how to recover MIME type attachments sent via email, and also downloaded over TCP connections. Is there a way to recover these types of data from a WireShark pcap (Packet Capture) file please? Is there a Computer forensics forum that somebody can recommend me to join to learn these techniques please? Jed

Whenever I do a new installation of Windows, I wipe the whole drive - sector by sector first, so it's totally clean and virus free. I use a program called Vivard, that is on the Ultimate Boot CD, under HDD Utilities: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ On version 5.0.3 Vivard is under: HDD->Diagnosis->Vivard, at the end of the available programs. Obviously I boot vivard from the UBCD, so the whole drive can be erased. In this case, this might not be a suitable option to wipe the whole drive, but you might find usefull in at other times. Jed

Thanks for the update Glen. I have installed the version from post #20 on my Win XP SP3 laptop, and it works fine. Under the settings it would be nice to set the pop-up info box as sticky, and also to be able to set the update interval in seconds, so the drive info is updated every n seconds? Would you be willing to release this as a GPL project please? I think it would be a good way for others to learn how to put together a simple Windows application - a bit like the famous 'Hello World' test program - or is there something like that already? Jed