max75

A hardware firewall with NAS works great and blocks about 99% of the hackers. Furthermore they are easy to maintain and not expensive. I only used hardware firewalls in about 100 small bussinesses and never had a succesful hack attempt.

You could try making a Ghost to another harddrive (use sector by sector methode if the filesystem is corrupt. This would save most of your data. The BB versions of the Western Digital drives have a standard warranty of 2 years and should survive for that period at least. But with all mechanical things, it can break due to a production or handling error. At the website of WD you can download a harddrive testing util. PLace it on a bootable flop and run the tests to figure out what is wrong. You probably get an error code. You can call your supplier or HP-Compaq with this code together with your problem description. They should replace the harddrive.

You could try updating manually: WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe -s:path to install files If this doesn't work. The problem is not in nlite.

I use an Acer laptop 1700 series. It has some nice features: 17" TFT-screen !!! standard harddrive and memory, which makes it very cheap to upgrade. Free powerlifting exercises (it weights about 7,3K)

Well I always use 1 drive per OS and de-activate the unused drives in the bios (I now have 6 harddrives in my computer). The partitioning you suggest seems fine to me but there might be some problems that XP might see the swap drive as being corrupt. (They use a similar filingsystem). I had some serious issues using Fat32 in partitions bigger than 54Gb. So you might want to avoid that.

The only things I can think of are: The failing drivers are in a directory or contain filenames containing "abnormal" charaters. (Like é). During the Text en GUI setup I whitnessed strange behavior on such characters. There are spaces in the directory structure. I also read somwhere that the path after $oem$\$1 should not contain over 31 characters.

In respons to Durex: Software raid5 slows your performance for about 10% compared to hardware raid. The problem with hardware raid though is that when your controller blows up and it cannot be replaced by the same type, you need to reinstall your raid-set loosing all your data. On the other hand, trusting microsoft to never fail a software raid....

If you want to add the hotfixes on your cd, you must make a new one or use a rewritable. Hotfixes can be added using: hotfix.exe /integrate patch to installfiles You could also add them to the RunOnceEx.cmd as hotfix.exe /Q (and probably some other switches like /o /n /z) If you have a server present you could use login-scripts or have the unattended setup refer to a network-share in the RunOnceEx.cmd

I am afraid this is the dreaded shutdown problem. The shutdown fixes only work in 75% of the cases. There is a runddl-command which shut down your pc but I don't know the exact command.

Well, first of all the I915 chipset doesn't support windows 98. If your board manufacturer dis supply drivers and you did install them 2 things can be wrong. 1.) You need an INF-update. This update will install crucial drivers for your AGP-bus. 2.) Your graphics-adapter is installed correct but no monitor is installed. Right-click on your desktop and choose properties. Go to the last tab and see what Windows says is installed. It should be something like: Intel 915G adapter on plug-and-play monitor. If it says: Intel 915G on (unknown monitor), you should install a monitor. Click on the advanced butten, go to the monitor tab in install a plug and play monitor. IE 6 can't be uninstalled properly (There was a big lawsuit about that), but i should be completely compatible with windows 98. I installed several hundreds of machines with windows 98SE and IE6 and never had a problem.

Regarding prior post. The en is supposed to symbolize italic characters. It doesn't show correct though. (At least on my machine)

The syntax would be: net localgroup Administrators [I]domainname[/I]\[I]username[/I] /add You could use a script in the RunOnceEx.cmd part of your automated install. I am pretty sure however that it can also be configured using Active Directories. (That is if you use W2K or W2K3 server in your domain.

This is probably a DNS problem which has two solutions: 1.) The "official" way": Best practice with W2k3 server is to configure DHCP and DNS on the server. The DHCP should issue the dns-entry. So if for example your server has IP 192.168.0.2 the DHCP server settings would be for example: range 192.168.0.3-192.168.0.11 DNS: 192.168.0.3 Router: IP of your internet router. The xp machines have to be configured as DHCP clients. In the DNS configuration at the server you have to configure forwarders (i.e. the DNS servers of your provider) or else you don't have internet-connection. Also you have to authorize DHCP to use the DNS server. (An option somewhere in the DNS settings). If you don't do this you will get BINL errors in the event log. 2.) The other (much easier) way: If the XP clients don't do an domain logon on the server you can use a dos-command to establish a connection. Start a command promt and use the command: net use driveletter: \\ip-of-server\sharename You will be prompted to supply a username and password. The second method works independant of workgroupnames, you only have to have an IP-connection.

New types of keyboards usualy have a function-lock. Pressing this button will cause the function-keys to be active. (Default they are not). I think this is a very irritating option. But if F2 does work....hmm. Do you use a standard windows CD (i.e. not unattended)? After not detecting your harddisk, can you exit the setup using F3? You could tell the bios to use the sata in legacy mode. (Most mainboards have that option). Or try another (PS2) keyboard.

The partitiontable is probably corrupt or an other OS (like linux) was installed. There are several programs which can help repartition the drive. Other before me have mentioned some (partition magic is also a favorite of mine). If you don't have the software available, you could make a bootdisk with fdisk and format on it, boot from disk and see what partitions are on your disk. If needed repartion the disk (1 primary partition smaller then 54Gb). Exit fdisk and reboot from flop. Execute "Fdisk /mbr" (you get no respons just the next prompt) and then run format /s to install the boot-information from flop to harddrive. Now you should be able to boot from the harddisk in dos. If all this works, installing windows from CD should work too. If this doesn't work, you better check your disk for errors. (Every manufacturer has a program you can run from floppy-disk for error-testing). Good luck.