Nomen

I've cloned XP dozens of times back in the day, with Ghost 2003, and the clone always booted. I've rarely cloned a win-7 drive, but it seems that every time I do, the damn thing won't boot and I have to putz with a setup CD or drive tool of some sort to "fix it", but I never figure or am never told what the hell the problem was. An example error is: 0XC000000e The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. Why isin't Ghost cloning this thing so that it's bootable? Is this a known thing for ghost 2003 or is there some ghost setting that I don't have right? What bit or what-ever on the drive is not flipped in the right direction to cause this?

This is what I've always used: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WindowsEmbedded\ProductVersion] "FeaturePackVersion"="SP3" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\WEPOS] "Installed"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\WES] "Installed"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady] "Installed"=dword:00000001 I last used that a few days before the supposed end of the update support for XP (July?) while creating several new master XP installations for several motherboards and it worked fine. But in any case - can I get an answer to the question -> is WU still updating XP-POS systems?

A couple of days ago I was testing Klonezilla and used to to clone an XP master drive. The drive had SP3 but hadn't been powered up since october 2012. It was up-to-date at that time. I started the clone and was surprised to see, within a few minutes, the gold shield in the task bar telling me there were updates available. Seemed to be a few dozen updates, the last on the list being the XP end of life notification. I selected all except for the EOL notification and they downloaded and installed, and then no other updates were offered. I then ran my POS reg file (the one that creates 4 registry keys) and restarted several times but still no other updates were offered. I was thinking that maybe I'll re-clone the drive and then run the reg file before I let it try accessing the WU server. Or is what I'm seeing known behavior - that MS is no longer offering POS updates through WU?

Also mentioned here: Only 44 hits in all the interwebs for the quoted phrase "Target state is Absent. Client id: Deepclean." I see that I have a DeepClean.log in c:\windows\logs\CBS dated nov 16. It only contains entries dated Nov 16. These are the first few lines of that file: =========== 2019-11-16 20:06:21, Info DISM Service Pack Cleanup UI: PID=8432 Superseded Service Packs 0 - CScavengeCleanup::GetSpaceUsed 2019-11-16 20:06:35, Info CBS DC: Ensuring the online components hive is loaded to load maps... 2019-11-16 20:06:38, Info CBS DC: Clearing cache... 2019-11-16 20:06:38, Info CBS DC: Finding superseded packages... 2019-11-16 20:06:38, Info CBS Skipping: Microsoft-Windows-CodecPack-Basic-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7601.17514 due to applicability ============ Would like to know what initiated or triggered that activity, based on what settings, and what the results are for future system stability / functionality. This install of windows was created using 7lite (or what-ever it's called) back in oct 2016 and had all known/good kb's rolled in and has not performed a windows-update check since then and has automatic updates disabled.

I'm flipping through my Win-7 event viewer and I see (as of Nov 16) a bunch of entries in the setup logs as follows: Initiating changes for package KB3087039. Current state is Installed. Target state is Absent. Client id: Deepclean. A reboot is necessary before package KB2532531 can be changed to the Absent state. There are dozens if not a hundred or so of each of those, with all sorts of KB numbers. What's going on here?

I'm putzing with a new Synology NAS and was wondering about NFS for XP. When it comes to SMB, XP is only capable of SMB-1 and no service pack seems to exist to give it SMB-2 capability. When it comes to NFS, there seems to be something called "Windows Services for UNIX" for which the MS links no long work and archive.org does not seem to have them. So I'm wondering if they would be on any MSDN or technet CD's. If this package exists on MSDN then I will likely have it, but I'd need to know which CD to look for. Any ideas? Anyone ever get NFS working on XP?

I'm getting this protocol error again: Firefox can't connect securely to (...).storage.googleapis.com because the site uses a security protocol which isin't enabled. This is with Roytam's 5/4/2018 firefox with DLL's copied from Retrozilla 2.2 (2/23/2019). As mentioned just above, I had seemingly fixed this error by copying all files from root of Retrozilla folder to the Firefox folder, copying over all DLL's with the same name. This allowed the content from the above URL to be displayed. Just this morning I'm seeing this same error again. I have no googleapis cookies, I've cleared the firefox cache, and my system time and date clock are correct. I can copy the link to the offending googleapis file (its a jpeg) to Opera 12.02 and it is rendered just fine. It is also rendered just fine on Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.6. With netscape 7.2, I first get a "website certified by unknown authority" which according to Details is Google Internet Authority G3. I can accept the certificate, which I do, and then I get this error: Netscape 7.2 and (...).storage.googleapis.com cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorythms. Retrozilla 2.2 can display the image with no protocol issues. I had both Retrozilla 2.2 and Roytam firefox (with retrozilla DLL's) side-by-side while viewing https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/viewMyClient.html and they seem identical. Opera 12.02 has a much shorter list of Cipher Suites, but all the ones it is is showing are also showing on Firefox. But Opera is supporting "OCSP stapling" and Firefox is not (neither is retrozilla). Any ideas how to get to the bottom of this? Are security protocols and ciphers negotiated based on browser user-agent? Edit: And today, looking at the same website that has all these storage.googleapis jpg files on it's site, everything is working fine again. What is going on with this?

For quite a while I've been running Firefox Community edition (Roytam's version) compiled on 5/4/2018. See page 17 of this thread. Just today I began to get security protocol errors on some components of a website I regularly view. The components are small clip-art or jpg elements that are hosted on storage.googleapis.com. I can post the URL of an example of one of these if asked. I tried one of those URL's on Opera 12.02 and it had no problem. So I don't know what security protocol or cipher googleapis is using for this, but what-ever it is, opera 12.02 has it. Anyways, I've just downloaded and installed this newer version of Retrozilla, and it *does* work on these URL's, so there must be some new protocols or ciphers added to it. My question now is - how do I get this new install of retrozilla to look like my current Roytam version (which is installed in programfiles / mozilla firefox and was not touched or modified by the installation of this newer version) ? I would like my bookmarks, search window, menu bar with quick links to be imported / copied to the new install. Is there an easy way to do this? Like copy some files over to it? edit: I copied all the files in the root of /program files/retrozilla/ into my existing /program files/mozilla firefox/. Just copied the files in the root, not the sub-folders. These files are mostly dll's. So I now have retrozilla.exe and firefox.exe in that folder. I ran the firefox.exe (5/4/18, 7128 kb) and it works fine. It doesn't give me the security protocol error that I was getting yesterday. I note that retrozilla.exe (2/23/19) is only 156 kb. It doesn't run when I launch it from /program files/mozilla firefox/. It looks like the only protocol difference is that Retrozilla 2/23/19 has support for 2 additional algorithms: Signature algorithms SHA512/RSA SHA512/ECDSA Those functions must be contained in a dll that firefox.exe is (now) using.

I don't think that's why I was seeing .Net updates. I performed a new XP install and activation today (july 20) and got 130 updates from M$. I then did the POS thing and only got 30 more updates (on other systems I've gotten 60). I don't think any of them were .net. On the systems where I did get .net updates after doing POS, those systems had installed .net (version 2?) as part of installing the video driver (some extra stuff other than the drivers got installed, and they came with some version of .net). On the system today, after the 30 POS2009 updates, no more were offered. I then installed a bunch of .net versions (2, 3.5, 4) and after that I got a whack more kb updates, and they were almost all .net (a few weren't). Not to get side tracked too much, but what other stuff should I install (that I might need or want some day) on a new XP install with POS that would trigger more KB updates to be offered (assuming the update servers are still up) ? Are there any MS Office updates that are only offered to a POS system?

Yesterday I installed XP on an AMD-based ASROCK motherboard (again, a board with no floppy controller). This one had a single SATA controller, and all ports could only be set to either IDE or AHCI. So I installed XP with the ports set to IDE. After all other drivers were installed, I added a SATA pci card. XP found the card and I gave it the AHCI drivers for it. I then shut it down, moved the XP drive to the card, set the on-board SATA ports to AHCI and restarted. XP booted up just fine, and now it detected the on-board SATA controller. I looked at the device ID string for controller, and searched all inf files for the string in all the driver files I had downloaded and expanded from Asrock. I found only 1 file buried deep in one directory tree that had the matching device ID. It worked, and I installed the driver. Shut down the computer, removed the PCI card, reconnected the drive back to the on-board controller, XP started just fine. Only after all this, with the drive controller in AHCI mode and all other drivers installed, do I perform XP activation (I used telephone method - not smart phone option). It would have taken me hours of trial and error to find the right driver for a grub-based F6 floppy install. Do all updates (about 130, avoid WGA) then run POS reg file, get a bunch more. Why does MS not offer any .NET security patches/updates for regular XP-SP3 like they do for POS2009?

I could scream. Scream, I tell ya. I finally realized that I'm putzing with Sata/AHCI drivers for a controller that my hard drive is not even connected to! This motherboard has a Marvell 2-port controller that I have set to AHCI in the bios but my hard drive is connected to an "on-chip" controller that has 6 ports, the first 4 of which can be set independantly of the last 2. So I finally clued in that I will connect my hard drive to port 5. Port 5 and 6 set to IDE in the bios. I set ports 1-4 as AHCI (SATA). I boot XP, and bingo - it finds new hardware. It loads some new / different driver files and *now* it has the drivers for the "on-chip" controller. I shut down and connect the hard drive back to port-1. Port 1-4 is still set in the bios as AHCI/SATA. I boot back up, and XP has no problems. The Marvell controller I was putzing with the drivers for the floppy F6 XP install turn out to be eSATA ports on the back-plate of the motherboard. So - it seems you can get XP running in AHCI mode when it was originally installed on a drive in IDE mode if you can get the SATA drivers installed. I was lucky my board has a multi-channel controller where some ports can be in IDE mode and others in AHCI/SATA mode. If that wasn't the case, then another way to do this would be to temporarily install a PCI sata card, have XP see the card as a new device and install the drivers, then reboot with XP drive connected to the PCI card. But before rebooting, set the on-mother board SATA controller to AHCI/SATA mode. That way, XP will boot and "see" the motherboard sata controller and then you install the drivers, power down, pull the PCI controller out and re-connect the drive to the motherboard sata controller.

Ok, I've just read the manual. I think I'm gonna feel like a dummy. If you want, the manual is here: http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Manual/mb_manual_ga-990fxa-ud3_v.4.0_e.pdf Sata/AHCI instructions start on page 70. They say to copy the files to a USB floppy drive (?). I wouldn't have thought that would work. But the main thing is that I'm supposed to select two drivers during the F6 session. Perhaps that's why it's asking for the floppy a second time. I'm going to see if I have a USB floppy drive somewhere, but I'll try this again and select both drivers.

I made some progress but in the end it didn't work. One thing I did was use the following sequence of grub commands: find --set-root /floppy.img map /floppy.img (fd0) map --hook chainloader (fd0)+1 rootnoverify (fd0) map --floppies=1 boot I tried your instructions - and they did work. I was able to get a directory listing of A drive. But then I re-booted and the floppy A drive was gone, so I thought there was a problem and I needed to do something different with grub. So that's when I stumbled on the above code. I was under the impression that the floppy image would persist (ie survive an actual re-boot) but it seems it doesn't. During XP installation if you press F6 and don't have your A drive setup working and you abandon the install, you now have a dual-boot drive (DOS, and Windows setup). At that point I choose DOS, do the grub thing, get the dual-boot choice and now choose Windows setup. Very soon at that point windows lets you press F6, and bingo, it sees a floppy disk with SATA hardware choices. I had to mess with creating the right files and oemsetup.txt and stuff to get that right. A few times I make a choice and get a strange error, or a certain file can't be found. Ok, I get past that and it continues and I get the EULA screen where I have to press F8 to continue, and then it wants to restart and says the DOS mode install is over. But soon after restarting it says "put the floppy in the drive A and press enter" and I keep pressing enter and nothing happens. I can only quit at that point I think. I was reading somewhere else where you are asked twice for the floppy and you can set up a ramdisk in DOS and it will work the first time but it won't work the second time (because dos is not invoked hence no ram drive). I thought grub would make MBR disk changes so that the virtual floppy image would always be present during a boot, but it doesn't seem to be - or there are more commands in grub to make that happen than what I've been able to find. I would also like to know how to use grub to check if the floppy image is "contiguous". What I've found about that is hard to follow / execute.

I've never used grub4dos, so yes if there are instructions how to do this then please show me where. Thanks.

With the computer booted into DOS (98 dos), if I set up a ramdrive and somehow manage to assign it as the "A" drive, and if I copied the sata drivers to it, would I then be able to run the XP install (from the copy of the CD already on the drive) and by pressing f6 would it "see" the ramdrive (and hence see the driver files) ?

Creating a few XP installations on couple of brand new-in-box motherboards (new as in 4 years ago) before (I guess?) they turn off the activation server. I did the phone activation tonight - MS still has it working. I installed XP on a FAT32 volume. Motherboard does not have floppy connector. I was trying to figure out how to get the SATA drivers into XP during install. Entire XP cd image is already on the drive and so are all the drivers. In the end I set the motherboard to IDE mode to get the install done. After all drivers were installed I tried changing back to SATA mode (aka ahci?) but XP kacks during the spash screen. Same with safe mode. Since we're talking fat32, is there anything I can do to shut down XP, mess with some files while running in DOS, then boot back up in SATA mode and XP doesn't kack? Alternatively, can I just drop some driver files into /i386 folder (or what-ever folder) where I have the copy of the XP cd and XP will just find them during install? You can do that when installing win-98 yes? How about XP?

I don't know much about MQTT, but I'm fooling around with some ESP8266 modules and I guess I need to set up a broker and the only thing I have running 24/7 are a couple of NT4 servers and a 2K server. There's something called a mosquito broker but I don't know if it runs on anything older than XP.

Got a new (refurbished) Dell laptop for the office. It came with win-10 preinstalled. We tried to install Office 2007 on it using one of our tech-net licenses, but apparently either the licenses no longer work, or MS isin't performing online licensing / activation for office 2007 any more. We are sticking with 2007 because it's the last version compatible with exchange running on our win-2k server. But even though the activation didn't seem to work , the product itself seems to be functioning on the laptop so I'm wondering what's going on...

I just visited youtube using ie10 and after dismissing a screen that told me my browser was depreciated, I got the usual youtube front-end video selection screen and I did a search for a jazz group and I'm now playing / listening to a video in the background as I type this using FF. This is on a win7-32bit OS.

When the system has booted into XP using the original 240 gb drive as the boot drive, the new 500 gb drive is totally absent in disk management. I even quickly downloaded and installed WD data life-guard for windows and ran it, and it does not find or present the new drive to me. And to reply to jaclaz, my first few attempts to boot the system with the new 500 gb drive were with that drive as the only drive connected to the system.

This may not be an XP-related problem, but because the computer being used is running XP I'm posting this here. A few years ago I cloned what I think was an 80 gb drive to a 240 gb SSD drive. The 80 gb drive was partitioned as 24 gb FAT (C drive) and the remainder as NTFS (D drive). The C drive had XP-pro, sp3. The motherboard in question is Gigabyte, exact model escapes me at the moment, it is AMD (AM2 or AM3 CPU), 6 SATA ports, 2 IDE ports. Relatively modern motherboard (maybe 5 years old?). This belongs to a relative of mine, not local to where I am. I was recently visiting, brought a new 500 gb WD Blue SSD. Used Norton Ghost 2003 to clone the 240 GB SSD to the new drive. Ghost resized the C partition to 44 or 48 gb (ie - doubled the size). The original C drive (FAT32) was using 16kb cluster size. Offhand I don't know if that was maintained or not in the new cloned drive. Anyways, after the clone (which was performed really fast, at 3200 mb/min) I placed the new drive in position in place of the old drive, then tried to boot the system into XP. The XP splash screen appears, with the moving / sliding indicator which moves back and forth a few times, then a barely visible blue or black-screen error message is flashed before the system crashes and reboots. Upon restart, I get the usual screen (windows didn't start, how do you want to start this time, safe mode, normal, etc). No matter what I try, I get the same crash and restart. The safe mode startup scrolls a list of files being loaded, and always craps out at the same file (which right now I can't recall what that was). Presumably the crash happens when XP switches into 32-bit mode during bootup and stops accessing the drive using INT13 bios routines? Here's the wierd part. If I boot the original drive, and connect this new drive to a different SATA port, the system boots fine into XP, but in disk management the new drive is completely absent. Detect new hardware does nothing. In the bios, when I select boot device, the bios sees both drives just fine. If I swap the SATA ports the drives are connected to, and I still boot the old drive, XP still can't see the new drive. If I boot DOS with a floppy, I can see both drives (at least the FAT32 partition) on both drives. Bios is set the SATA ports as native (not IDE). I have the new drive with me, so what I plan to do next is connect the drive to another XP machine that I have with SATA ports and see if the drive is visible / accessible on another machine (with different motherboard). I can also connect it to a win-98 machine with SATA controller, and (as last resort) can connect it to win-7 machine. So based on what I've seen so far, it seems that there is a hardware incompatibility between the new drive and SATA controller that renders the drive invisible under XP. Now whether this incompatibility is caused by how the drive has been formatted (ie the ghost clone and the FAT32/NTFS combination of the original source drive) or if it is something at lower hardware level, I don't know. Anyone got any ideas or comments?

I looked at the ghost.ini that's on the bootable Ghost floppy and there's a setting for the -fro option and changed it to yes and the clone worked just fine. I should have found out about that years ago. The default setting for Ghost requires that the source drive be in perfect shape, and I've been tripped up by that more than once.

After downloading and reading the Ghost 2003 user guide (200 pages!) I see there many command-line arguments, and I think I will be using this one: -fro Forces Norton Ghost to continue cloning even if the source contains bad clusters. I would have thought that all options that are configurable at the command prompt would be available in the GUI, but I guess not. I think I'll also do a SMART check on the drive while slaved in XP and see what that says. Edit: Yes I think that when I've tried to use disk-checking tools in NT they seem to do nothing. This drive has been slaved to XP systems many times over the years for various reasons (like defrag). The original install dates back to 1998 or 1999 when it was a different (smaller) drive. edit: For what it's worth, I found this tid-bit on Symantec's site: "Ghost 2003 will not support correctly cloning anything above XP. You need GSS 2.0 (ghost 11.0) to clone Vista and GSS 2.5 to clone Vista and 7. It will also not support cloning any drive above 2TB I believe."

This is not really an XP question as much as it is a general NTFS question, but I figure I'd post it here. I was trying to Ghost an 80 gb hard drive today, a drive that I try to clone at least once a year, one of several. This is to create a backup. The drive is from an NT4 server, and the file system is NTFS. Normally the clone operation goes smoothly, but this time I kept getting a read error on the source drive at the same set of 4 sectors. Ghost doesn't say what files are located there, and it stops the clone and exits after telling me about the problem. I've slaved the drive to a running XP system and have had XP do a file-system check and a surface scan of all 3 partitions on the drive, and it finds nothing wrong. So I was going to find out what files are using those sectors and copy them off the drive and then delete them. Thinking that the sectors will become un-allocated and Ghost won't try to access them. I've found similar questions on stack exchange and superuser.com and one way to find out is to use a utility called nfi.exe - Windows NT File System (NTFS) File Sector Information Utility which is part of Microsoft OEM Support Tools Phase 3 SR2. So I ran it and found the sectors were used by a file in an RP (restore point?) folder in System Volume Information. At first I couldn't do much there until I added "all users" full control and then I could mess with those files. I copied the particular RP folder off the drive and then tried to nuke as much inside the System Volume Information folder that I could (because NT4 doesn't use it - right?). Strange thing though - I run nfi.exe after deleting the file (the entire RP folder) and it still reports those sectors being used by the file in question even though the file is gone in explorer and a file-search for the file turns up nothing. Anyways, short story is that after doing that, Ghost still balks about a read error at the same sectors, so I'm not too impressed at this point and I want to do something to those sectors to make Ghost happy but I don't know what. Any ideas?

So where is this Edge for Win-7? Have they released it yet? I have zero familiarity with Edge. Are there add-ons for it? Site, content blocking? I have some FF addons - like right-click "remove this object" that I don't know if they exist on newer versions of FF. And I need to have a browser with Java, and a browser that is compatible with various IP webcams and security cameras. I think there are some browsers where you can't enter an alternate port-number on the end of a URL, and I need to be able to do that. And an easy way to view source. Being based on chromium, does that mean it has all sorts of hooks back to google? I will not touch chrome for that reason.