Nakatomi2010

In my experience NOTHING is impossible, I've had a customer call us up at Best Buy (When I used to work there) and tell us he installed the color cartridge in the black slot, and black in color. Now, ANYONE who's installed inkjet ink cartridges KNOW this is impossible, yet here this man had accomplished it. And then wanted us to give him a new one because it was clearly labeled. So I've adopted a new statement as a result of Douglas Adams. "Nothing is impossble, just very very improbable" No, in this case, it's extremely improbable that the mobile drivers were installed, as if they were the system would not function properly, you'd be getting blue screens of death. Sorry... Nothing better to do tonight...

No one else run accross this or think it's an issue?

Alright, bootsector restored... Here's how I chose to do it.... I began an XP install on the new drives, then once it's got through the text setup and into the GUI setup I restarted the system and booted into a WinPE environment, from there I deleted the contents of the drive including the System Volume Information directory and recycler directory, it was blank, but not formatted the bootsector and all that jazz was still there. ThenI copied all the old system files back into place in their "as is" recovered states. From there I saw there was no boot.ini file so I booted into the recovery console and copied ntldr and ntdetect.com to the root of C: then did "Bootcfg /rebuild" to recreate the boot.ini file... Aaand BAM. No repair install even needed the **** thing booted like nothing happened.

Hey, I own a media center PC (XP Professional VLM) which I've used the More than one Concurrent Connection tweak on in order to allow me to remotely connect as one user to initiate downloads, while the other user logged in locally can be watching movies and stuff... Works pretty **** well too... Well, I was having trouble with the wife's laptop (XP Home OEM) so I did a format and reload and installed XPize in the process. So, clean install on a computer which has been able to log in remotely before, meaning that XPize was also a fresh install. (Minus CMD and bootscreen mods). Everytime I'd try connecting to the remote machine it'd spit back "It's either too busy or not accepting, contact the administrator", well after paging myself a couple of times I finally decided to respond and help. My OTHER computer (XP x64) was able to log in without any issues, so going back to the laptop I uninstalled XPize, and it worked like a charn after that... In short: XPize wasn't letting me connect remotly, no I don't know why... Anyone else had this problem?

I do 'Fixboot C:\' 'FixMBR C:\' and 'chkdsk /r' and nothing....

How does one go about creating a bootsector, when the system thinks there isn't one? The system suffered hard drive failure, I used GetDataBack to recover the data, then put the data back on the new hard drive, well the data is intact, but obviously the hard drive wont boot since it's not an entirely bootable drive... How would I go about making it bootable again? I've tried doing fixboot in the recovery console, that didn't work. I also tried a Repair install of XP, that didn't work either... Thoughts? Option B of course is that I HAVE the bootsector as a file, but don't know how to reintegrate it into the hard drive again... Title Edited - Please follow new posting rules from now on. --Zxian

I use WPI as a general software install CD, basically I through a bunch of software on it, then have WPI called through the autorun and then install software through the WPI prompt. It's damned convenient in cases where you didn't get to use your custom XP CD. However, I also use this thing on Windows 9x based machines, and while I can manually start WPI, I'd like the ability to stick it in the machine and it'd automatically start for me, recognizing the difference between a 9x and NT machine, starting WPI appropriatly either way.... Thoughts?

Either XPize or something I've been doing actually seems to speed the system I build right up... Though that may be because I'm disabling "Automatically Search for sahred resources" by default....

My sig has the distro.... Currently it takes me one hour to install any version of XP on a system, this includes time spent installing software, getting updates not in the current RyanVM pack, AVG updates, MS Antispyware updates, and Ad-Aware... I can do the same amount of stuff in about 45 minutes if I don't use Bashratified installs....

I guess learning how to do it at least will help me advance my career... Let alone the fun factor of learning it.... I just love working with computers... Honestly, I can't get tired of fixing them. Unless the customer is thick as a brick, and his computer is just another removal of virus and spyware.... ugh....

Are there any tutorials on how to use this properly? I'd be extremely interested in replacing WPI with this since it's a little more integrated...

I work at a computer store and I've been using the multi boot DVD listed in my sig to do a good chunk of all my installs of XP. However, I've lately been wondering if my DVD is the best method, or if I should perhaps invest some time in creating a network distrobution folder.... Would I get any speed by doing this, or it'd take about the same amount of time?

You'll have to excuse me as I can't seem to wrap my head around the unattended 98 install method... I can make a multiboot DVD, but can't make 98 unattended... Anyways... When attempting to do the CD I downloaded all the hotfixes seperatly, I was wondering if you guys know how I could go about making them all execute silently through as few clicks as possible....

What's more interesting is that some apps don't like the ('s in (x86), so you tend to end up with three Program Files directories.... Well, I did... I've got Program Files, Program Files (x86) and Program Files x86... I think it's more for friendly sorting of the applications. I'm sure they could all be lumped into one directory, buy by sorting it it makes troubleshooting things easy and such....

Don't get me started on that crap...

Let me run this theoretical fix on you guys and tell me what you think..... On the internet I found a method to basically do a manual registry restore, basically go into %systemdrive%\windows\system32\config and grab SOFTWARE, SAM, SECURITY, SYSTEM, and DEFAULT and back them up outside of the Windows directory, then you go into the system volume information directory and grab the snapshots of those files and replace the ones you backed up. This essentially restores the system to an earlier time. Now, I'm running under the assumption that the issue I'm looking at is something that's on the system. So, what I want to try is to go in and backup those 5 files, do a parallel install of XP (Install a fresh install ontop of the old one) and then when t's complete go in and replace the new registry entries with the old ones and then attempt the repair install. This should, in theory, "reboot" all of the Windows files, and leave the rest of the hard drive intact. Then when you restore the registry and the programs you never deleted should still work, because you didn't delete the files they created. Or at least, it would require minimal effort to repair all the programs. Would this theoretically work as I'm describing it, or am I looking at a whole host of problems?

If I weren't going away for Christmas I'd make you let me try, but I'm going away from my computer for Christmas.... ****..... Be nice to have an optimize 64-bit XP gaming system... Imagine the speed without all that bloat..... And why you posting in here, shouldn't you be finalizing it?

The modifications your conducting, would they be abe to be applied to XP x64 edition?

It's a corpoarte machine, and trying to use a VLM disc. I've got an ogriginal that I've tried, without success... The full reinstallation was using the same VLM disc, so I know the disc is good, I just don't know what could be interferring with it on the hard drive....

I've got a machine here that I'll be doing a format and reload on if I don't find a solution by 2 or 3 this afternoon... I believe all I need to do is a repair install to fix XP, but whenever I try to do a repair GUI setup always says there are missing files, when they're not. I've tried 3 CDs and they all do the same thing. Different CD-ROM drives, different IDE cables, and even ghosted his orignal drive to a completely different one, same result. I did a format and reload on the new duplicate I'd made and the install went perfectly fine. I've run hard drive and RAM diagnostics, the computer passed them all, virus and spyware scans. The system is clean (Scans run from a WinPE CD) Thoughts? Title Edited - Please follow new posting rules from now on. --Zxian

Hey, I was wondering if someone could tell me what the contents of the Media Center 2005 CD set is, the directory structure in particular.... Collegue of mine is try to reinstall it on an HP machine, and while I have both CDs, I've got them in the same directory on my machine, and I need to know which go where so I can make him a set.. (He has a COA, and it says MCE2005 - HP)

This key isn't different different though, is the same one that's on the COA....

Don't think that means it's impossible, just means they don't recommend it... I think....

Copied the entire SP2 Deployment kit just to be sure it's all there.... As well as whatever files it wanted while loading, and stuck those into the \Sysprep\i386\ directory, just like it wants... And I DO reseal the system.... And I've got the sysprep.inf file in the %Systemroot%\Sysprep\ directory... One additional piece of info is that it's running Windows XP Home Edition OEM Here's my Sysprep.inf: ;SetupMgrTag [Unattended] OemSkipEula=Yes InstallFilesPath=C:\sysprep\i386 [GuiUnattended] AdminPassword=* EncryptedAdminPassword=NO TimeZone=35 [UserData] ProductKey=xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx [SetupMgr] DistFolder=C:\sysprep\i386 DistShare=windist [Identification] JoinWorkgroup=WORKGROUP [Networking] InstallDefaultComponents=Yes Obviously the xxxxx's aren't what I'm using as a product key, but you gte the idea...

Depends on your point of view... I deleted the LANG folder to make more space... Basically I'm using a slimmed XP, mixed in with open source software, and a ton of drivers.... My technique essentially allows me to have a computer built for a customer within two hours of asking for one... An hour and a half if everything goes right.... That's time to build (30 to 60 minutes), time to install (About 45 to 60 minutes) and time to update everything (5 to 10 minutes).... As a quick addendum to this thread... the Sysprep is still not accepting the key, despite it being letter for letter... What's up with that? When you buy a brand name computer they don't ask for the pruduct key.... I got the missing files problem solved, now I just need the Asking for a CD key problem solved...