bizzybody

Finally, success. Downloaded the F6 Intel Matrix Storage Manageer driver floppy, extracted the WinImage EXE, used MagicISO to extract iastor.sys from that temp.IMA file. Plugged the hard drive into a non-Dell computer. Then UBCD4Win was able to boot correctly. Copied iastor.sys to windows\system32\drivers and used the remote Registry editor to merge Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_2922&cc_0106]"Service"="iaStor""ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStor]"Type"=dword:00000001"Start"=dword:00000000"Group"="SCSI miniport""ErrorControl"=dword:00000001"ImagePath"="system32\\drivers\\iaStor.sys""tag"=dword:00000019"DisplayName"="Intel AHCI Controller"[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStor\Parameters]"queuePriorityEnable"=dword:00000000[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStor\Enum]"0"="PCI\\VEN_8086&DEV_2922&SUBSYS_B0051458&REV_02\\3&13c0b0c5&0&FA""Count"=dword:00000001"NextInstance"=dword:00000001NOW it boots the Dell into Windows XP so *finally* I can do the XP32 to Vista32 upgrade. From there I should be able to OEM the thing and the horrid little black box can go off to a happy owner.

Going to try UBCD4Win on a flash drive to correct the HDC. Then I'll try starting Vista 32 bit upgrade from a flash drive. That it'll boot from. For some reason this Optiplex 255 claims it can't read a file (after it boots from the disc) on every bootable CD or DVD I've tried - all of which I know are just fine because they work on other computers. Try to use the F12 boot menu to boot from USB and it locks up, but set USB to be the first option in BIOS and it'll boot. Gets the same bogus "errors" from discs either way. It'd probably work fine with a replicated Dell OEM XP or Vista disc. (Stupid backarsewards design with the slots on the wrong end - and everything else proprietary about it! How can it cost them less to make a completely custom design???) Edit: Now this is just crazy. UBCD4Win boots off USB to the menu, I launch it and partway through it switches to booting off the hard drive and of course BSOD. How can it be use to fix a PC that will not boot if it insists on attempting to boot off the hard drive? In over 30 years I've not seen a PC so resistant to functioning properly as this Dell!

I've taken a hard drive with XP Pro 32 bit from a dead system (failing power supply) and installed it in a Dell Optiplex 755 that came with Vista. XP fails to boot the Dell. Stop error 0x0000007b. Most likely the SATA controller in the old box was set to IDE mode. What I'd like to do is boot off a Vista DVD, do an upgrade (32bit) to keep all the owner's files etc, then convert to OEM to match the original Vista version the Dell shipped with. Should be all legal etc since the computer will have the same OS version it originally came with. Edit: Just tried the ATA and Legacy settings on the Dell, it refuses to see the hard drive as a boot device with those. It'll only boot off the hard drive when set the AHCI mode.

Could be IE 11. Whichever it is, it's completely silly for Microsoft to not have made certain that one of their flagship online products actually works with their own browser.

Went to a client's office today. She replaced a horrid old underpowered Dell XP box (circa 2005 with only 256 megs RAM she never would have upgraded) with a HP Win 7 Home Premium system with 6 gig RAM. For her business e-mail she uses what used to be Outlook.com and before that was MSN's e-mail. It worked just fine with Firefox on XP but she wasn't happy with the browser for various reasons. Now on the newer computer the e-mail just flat out does not work in Internet Explorer 10. Logs in but from there it's all a wreck. Might be able to get to Inbox, and sometimes it's possible to reply to an e-mail. Getting into other folders only works once in a while but only by right clicking then clicking open in a new tab. Most of the time there are the white dots running across the top. Also, IE is constantly claiming it has stopped working even though it's still loading sites and working as it should (except with the MS e-mail). Complete, utter FAIL. I'd think that if any website should work 100% perfectly in the latest web browser from Microsoft, it should be a website from Microsoft. So I installed Google Chrome, go to the e-mail and it's like 1960's Batman pounding the Joker, *BAM* *BIFF* *POW* the site is fast and smooth as can be. Not a glitch, not a problem, no delays, it's as if it's working with everything directly on the PC. (The office has very fast internet.) Client is happy happy joy joy. So color me confused. Why is MS+MS=FAIL on this and are there any known solutions to this issue? Or do we just wait for Microsoft to get around to making their own products work together? I know it's not a unique or even rare problem, a quick *ahem* Google or even Bing search shows it's very common, and also happened in the previous incarnation of MS's e-mail site. Until Microsoft gets their act together, I'll just recommend Chrome to everyone having this issue. If they don't like Chrome, too bad, it's what works.

I'm putting together a system around an AM3 board with the AMD 870 SB850 chipset, so I go to AMD's site, to drivers and downloads. All they have are video drivers. This board doesn't have integrated video. The board manufacturer's download is version 8.947.0.0 release date 2012-09-20 If there's a newer release, I want it. At least I can get the video drivers for the Radeon HD 6870, of course bundled/bloated with Catalyst and other stuff I won't be installing and would rather not waste the time and space to download.

No antivirus on the system being used for this. It's not connected to the internet. 5eraph, I'll try your script, thanks.

I've found this, was for 500, I changed the 500 to 1000 but it doesn't move 1,000 files. It first moved 997 files and each time it moves fewer. The 21st iteration only moved 923. The decrement in the number of files it moves is not always the same, it goes up and down but is always less than the previous number. echo offmd folder1SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansionset movedFiles=0for /R d:\folder\ %%G in (*) do ( echo moving... "%%G" move /Y "%%G" d:\folder1\ set /a movedFiles+="1" if !movedFiles! EQU 1000 GOTO endOfCopy rem if you moved 1000 files ) :endOfCopy echo Done, %movedFiles% files Were copied successfully pauseENDLOCALI added the line to make the directory. I manually increment the new folder's number then doubleclick this again to get another folder1 full of files. The files will be in batches small enough to process but it would be nice if it would move exactly 1,000 files each time. Even better would be to have it automatically create sequentially numbered folders to move the batches of files into, then gracefully quit when there's less than 1,000 files left in the source directory or when it's empty.

With nearly 50,000 files, all the same type, in a single folder, Windows Explorer just chokes on it trying to open it - even on a Windows 7 x64 system with 4 gig RAM and a T5600 CPU. Sorting by type won't work because they're all the same type. They're also all pretty close to the same size. 167 GB total. What I'd like to do is have a way to "blindly" grab the first 1,000 files, doesn't matter what their names are, and move them to another folder. Repeat until the folder is empty. 1,000 at a time is a much easier and faster chunk to process. Processing will sort them into other folders in much smaller lots.

Yes, it's SP1. I had WU install the huge number of post SP1 updates and after that it would finally go to the correct site to install Microsoft Update. Windows 7 needs an SP2 and Vista needs an SP3, but it looks like they'll never get them.

Fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate, no 3rd party software yet, not even antivirus, so can't blame this problem on anything but Windows. I want Windows Update to get updates for more than just Windows. I click the Find out More link and it launches IE 11, which opens a page telling me to use Windows Update - back where I just was. That's a big FAIL right there. That link should go somewhere that's actually useful, like a site that downloads and installs Microsoft Update for Windows 7. I need it to download some Bluetooth drivers, which it's refusing to do because Windows Update is set to get updates for Windows only, even after installing mobile device center, which it wouldn't do automatically when I paired my Motorola Photon Q with my laptop. (Another FAIL of it not doing what Microsoft's support people repeate endlessly it's supposed to do on their forums whenever anyone posts that it doesn't work.) How do I force this thing to install Microsoft Update or change the settings so it'll update MS Office etc and download the bluetooth drivers?

I upgraded an AM2 system to a dual core AM3 Phenon II CPU, which came with what looked like a decent cooler in the retail pack. But when running anything that uses the CPU much the cooler fan revs up to high speed and is extremely loud. Even Firefox will make it spin the fan as much as Kerbal Space Program does. (When it's hard to tell the difference between the sound effects in KSP and the CPU fan noise...) I'm planning on moving this CPU to an AM3 board and unlocking it to quad core so it will need even more cooling. I have an AM2 dual core CPU that will work in this system but it runs hotter than the Phenom II. With the cooler that came with the AM3 CPU the AM2 chip has it running full speed as soon as Windows starts to boot. What's available that will keep the CPUs cool and quiet?

I used the HP USB formatter. It completely wiped the drive and used all the space available.

I have a 32 gig (29 gig FAT32 formatted) thumb drive that I discovered has 145 meg of unallocated space at its beginning. (Found it while deleting a PQSERVICE partition from a hard drive.) I'd like to delete the existing partition and create a new one that uses all the space, but Disk Management in XP won't delete it nor will it create a new partition in the unallocated space. Doesn't matter that it's 145 meg, it's space I paid for and while small compared to the rest of the storage, 145 meg can still hold a lot of files.

USB composite devices are ones that have more than one function but use a single USB port. IIRC they also *do not* have an internal USB hub to connect their different functions as individual devices. The most common USB composite devices are printer/scanner/copier/FAX machines that also include a Type A USB port and/or a memory card reader. NUSB should support memory cards and USB Mass Storage devices connected through such multifunction devices or MFD's. Another common type of USB composite device is a digital camera or GPS (and some phones) with a memory card that can be accessed as USB mass storage at the same time as some other non-storage function of the device is also usable through the USB connection. Such devices where *only* the USB mass storage function is accessible through the USB port aren't composite devices. Some of those automatically switch modes when they sense they're connected to a computer and make their other functions iunusable, some can be manually switched and some allow access to the memory card from the computer but the device cannot access the memory card while the computer is doing so. That last situation is common with phones. Plug an Android phone into a USB port and you get a prompt to change to USB mass storage mode or just charging. Some phones have another option to connect as a mobile internet connection. (Of course the service provider may have disabled some of those features, which is where rooting the phone and custom Android builds enter the picture.)

This does not appear to be any of the common malwares that cause Windows to constantly reboot. Everything works fine on this Pavilion a1129n except for periodically a small dialog box with Unable to launch restart.exe pops up. The taskbar button has the Hewlett Packard logo on it. That leads me to believe this thing is a remnant of an HP software update that failed to clean up after itself. I've run full scans with Malware Bytes, MSE and others. All come up clean. The system exhibits no signs at all typical of having malware. I've installed driver and utility program updates from HP, cleaned up the registry with CCleaner and NTREGOPT. There's no antivirus on it other than MSE. What is sort of curious is it wasn't cluttered up with a load of software installs so I haven't had to uninstall anything, there weren't any presonal files from a previous owner in My Documents. It's one of the cleanest secondhand PCs I've ever seen. I can't find any reference to restart.exe in the Registry. Must be something else, most likely HP's software updater, attempting to launch it. The hard part is finding what/where that's happening and how to stop it. One good thing is the previous owner had not made the recovery DVDs so I did. I *could* nuke and pave it but this is such a small issue that should be simple to fix, would save a ton of time over wiping it and starting over. What would be quite annoying would be to do all that and have the exact same problem crop up. That could be why it went unused for so long, HP's software went *erk* and nobody could fix it.

I have a system with a Gigabyte MA-78GM-S2H board. It has two hard drives, each with an install of XP Pro SP3. I want to also install Vista or Win 7 and I definitely want that using SATA and AHCI so XP is going to have to be made to get along with it. One hard drive is IDE, the only IDE device in the box. The other hard drive is SATA, plugged into port 0. Curiously, SATA port 0 is a *slave port*. Way to go on that numbering fail, Gigabyte. I figured 0 should be the master port on the first controller... Also odd is that the default is for the PATA controller to be the first boot device. When I have SATA and AHCI mode set in BIOS, the XP install on the IDE drive doesn't even see the SATA controllers as needing drivers installed. They're completely invisible to it. I've tried several times following the same procedure that works with Intel chips (of course using AMD's drivers on this one!) but cannot get XP to install the AHCI drivers for the SB7xx series that are included with the XP driver download. It insists that the AHCI driver in the XP 32 folder, provided by AMD, is not the right driver for any of the IDE controllers. (Yes, I do know how to do all the steps to manually install a driver, have only 30 years experience with computers.) Is there a modded/hacked SB7xx AHCI driver package that'll force XP to accept it so it will work with SATA in SATA mode? IIRC all I had to do on an Intel chipset was rightclick the inf, click install, reboot to BIOS, change the mode, reboot and XP finished the driver setup. I guess AMD just has to be difficult!

I dug into the registry and deleted everything (that it would let me delete) I could find with Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio, booted into safe mode and then it would allow the two entries in device manager to be deleted. When I rebooted, it again found a MEDIA device but this time asked for specific files. I pointed it to the ones in the backup install of XP and it worked. Then I was able to install the Realtek HD audio driver followed by the ATi video driver. Normally the driver install order I use is chipset first, then video, then others.

I have a PC with two installs of XP Pro SP3 on two hard drives. One is a backup system, also used for doing more complete defrags on the main drive than is possible on a running system. I swapped to a new motherboard with totally different hardware. Had no problem getting the backup system's hardware drivers installed and working. But the main system has been a PITA. It keeps redetecting Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio as MEDIA but refuses to recognize any driver that's supposed to be for it. I even tried DriverMax to export the working driver from the backup system, but it failed at importing it to the main system. Attempts to install the Realtek HD Audio driver from Realtek or Gigabyte fails when the install is about 70% done. Also, the Radeon HD3200 driver from AMD or Gigabyte fails to fully install. I can set the resolution to the native dimensions of the monitor and 32bit color but none of the Catalyst and other software will install. I'm thinking it has something to do with the UAA driver because of the HDMI port, even though I have the BIOS set to use the VGA and DVI ports instead of the VGA and HDMI ports. Same thing happened on the backup install, video driver install failed until I installed the audio driver - with the exception that the audio driver would install. Windows will not allow the Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio entry in device manager to be removed, not even in safe mode because it "may be required to boot up the computer.". Really? An *audio device* that isn't functioning because XP won't allow the correct driver to be installed is *required* to boot the computer? Anyone have a software version of a prybar to get that driver out so Windows will reinstall it properly or allow the audio driver to install?

That's what the quote commands are for. Avoids confusion. Wasn't any reason to post a link to the old beta versions when I said to start with I already had them.

You haven't read the ENTIRE thread, especially not what I wrote where I explained about me running the BETA versions on XP. I already know what you just pointlessly posted. But you're just like so many people on web forums and usenet. Don't actually READ what the original poster wrote, then tell the OP to do *exactly what he or she has said they already did*. I read through entire threads to see what issue the OP has, to see if anyone has come up with things to try that I haven't tried for the specific problem, then IF I have something different to add or a solution I've tried that worked (and nobody else has posted about), I'll add my reply. What I *don't do* is just read the subject line, skip to the end and make myself look like a dumbarse who doesn't even read the OP's whole first post. DarkRats now has the RTM versions of the games (which you'd know if you had bothered to read the thread or even just the last two or three posts instead of skipping to the end to make a pointless post) and is going to see about patching them to work on XP.

Sent you a PM with a link. Don't know where the help files are for the games, they're not in the folders with the games' other files.

All I know about the RTM vista games is that after installing Alky 1.1 then copying the RTM version of the solitaire executable to XP, then right clicking and selecting either run vista executable or patch and run, doesn't work. Slecting Run does nothing at all, patch and run creates a manifest file, and nothing else happens. Would be nice if someone with the hack-fu know how would patch the RTM vista games executables like the beta versions were done. :-) Filedropper wouldn't let me download that. I tried Firefox, IE and Chrome, several times. It'd get to 20~26 megabytes then cut off the download. Blind sending? What decade does Filedropper think this is? Been a looooong time since I've run into a host that doesn't tell the browser the size of the file. Check out 4shared Free account gets you 15 gigabytes of space. You can select multiple files from other users' shared folders then save as a B1 file directly to your folder. Then you can download files from your account without the 20 second delay. 'Course you have to get the free B1 archive program, which is available for Mac, Win and Linux. Just uncheck the boxes to install the toolbar and change your homepage etc. :-P

I want the RTM versions. I already have the beta versions, which have been working on XP since before Vista was released to manufacturing. There was much noise made about getting the RTM versions working, along with other software that "requires" Vista, but nothing much since. Has anyone got any production release Vista software running on XP?

What's odd is I can't get the beta version Vista games to work anymore simply by dropping the emulation dll into system32. I found an updated version of the dll which worked for a while but then it quit too. Used to be I could do a clean XP SP3 install then run Autopatcher with all the updates to current then add that dll and setup the games. Now they only work with Alky installed. Dunno what Microsoft altered in some update or updates.