raskren

Nothing seems to be working... I killed all partitions and formatted the whole drive as FAT32 - one big partition. Win2k files are in a directory named "/Source/i386/" I can boot from a floppy and run the first portion of setup without difficulty. Setup then inititates a restart (requesting that I remove any bootable floppies) and the machine won't boot. I get either "invalid partition table" or "missing operating system". I assume that the first phase of setup would write the boot info to the hard drive before it tries to restart?! I have boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com files all in the root of the drive after the first restart. Any ideas why the installer won't come back?

Haven't tried it but seriously considered it. The only issue would be getting the bootsector onto the flash drive - typically we use Nero or Roxio to write the boot loader to the CD but these won't write to flash drives. You might want to Google a program called "Raw Write" or "RawWrite". This allows you write boot information to floppies and other removable media. I have never used it with USB media but I don't see why it couldn't work.

What is the point of this? There are hundreds of screenshots of 4074 all over the web anyways. Most have Aero/Glass running too.

How do you get progman.exe to run? Does it run on top of explorer or along side it? I can run the app without error but I don't get a different shell.

bledd, Those programs run because system32 is included in the path system variable. %SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem ^This is mine. You can add any folder you like.

Hulk, You're lucky! My laptop doesn't even have USB ports! Would it be possible to simply create one big FAT32 partition on this drive and run setup on it, thus [hopefully] avoiding the booting issue? I haven't tried it yet because of the time it takes to reformat the drive and put a new setup image on it. Its a slow drive talking to my computer over USB - I benchmarked it with Sandra for fun - ~7MB/s.

Well it worked, almost. I get to the 2nd restart and the machine will not boot. I don't even get a "missing operating system" message. Just a POST and that's it. I assume something is wrong with the partitioning/partition tables and the machine is trying to boot from the wrong partition. I used fdisk to set alternate partitions as active but nothing works.

So basically... Create a FAT32 partition for housing Win2k source Create an NTFS partition for Win2k installation Boot from regular FAT floppy Run WINNT from DOS command line Right?

If I format the drive as FAT32 would I need more than one partition? One for source content and the other for the install target? Otherwise, format would be formatting the media that it resides on...know what i mean?

No luck last night. I copied the entire contents of my nLite Win2K CD to the laptop hard drive over USB. I had also previously formatted the drive as NTFS to prevent the need for further formatting after setup. I created a floppy drive with NTFS support (read-only I think) and ran winnt.exe. I was immediately presented with a dialog box asking where the Windows install files were located. The default value in this box is D:\i386 (where they are). I hit return to accept and I get another error stating that the "configuration files could not be found or are corrupted" or something like that. I also tried removing winnt.sif, unattend.txt and unattend.bat from the source but I got the same error. Does anyone know what configuration files this error is referring to? Could the problem be read-only NTFS support?

Thanks, I understand. I just wanted to see what that skin looked like - never heard of it.

Well, that's much easier than I thought it would be. But, when I launch setup, doesn't it load/unpack a bunch of drivers and then restart (thinking its on a cd)? To clarify, is setup going to know the install files are on the hard drive and not on an ATAPI CDROM drive?

prathapml, Do you have a link to this skin?

I'm having some troubles getting Windows 2000 on this old machine. Its a Pentium 90 with about 64 MB of ram and a 1GB hard drive. Its got a PCMCIA slot and I just bought a new (but cheap) ethernet adapter for it. The problem is actually getting Windows onto the hard drive. The machine has a slot for either a 3.5" floppy drive or a CD rom drive. The CD drive is not bootable. I have to boot from Windows 2000 boot disks, which works fine up until everything is loaded from these disks and it looks for the CD Rom. I usually get a message saying that no valid CD rom drive could be found and installation aborts. The drive bay is not hot-swappable so removing the floppy drive once its done and inserting the CD rom drive shuts off the machine. It looks like the only way to get this to work is to load a preinstallation image to the hard drive (yes, I used nLite on my copy to make it real small). I know this can be done over ethernet and I also bought an adapter to allow me to copy data from my desktop, directly to the 2.5" laptop HD over USB. I'm very familiar with creating unattended CDs for use on new machines but never either of these methods. Is it simply a matter of loading an image to the hard drive and booting from a floppy to get setup started. Help I'm a noob. Any help/suggestions are appreciated. -Richard

Wow, this has been discussed so extensively on this forum. Use the search function.

^ Um no. This is wrong. All prefetching does is monitor applications and any associated processes as they startup. It does this several times and writes the data to a file in the prefetch folder. Next time you start the app, Windows will read ahead and load any files that it "thinks" may be used. Again, stored in the prefetch files. The prefetch files themselves are not "sections of files." That would be stupid and your prefetch folder would probably fill up in a few hours. Furthermore, these aren't scanned at startup and do not utilize any RAM when they're not being used. Why would it take 3 days to delete? That's ridiculous.

That's a router, right? You need to open up the port that Terminal Services uses. I think its TCP 3389. Then forward those packets to the IP address of the target machine. I.e. 192.168.1.101. Refer to your manual on how to do this.

Why are you posting this? We've got DWM, Aero, and Aurora to play with in 4074!!?

Another way: Open up command prompt Type: "cd\" "attrib -r -s -h boot.ini" "edit boot.ini" DOS editor opens - remove longhorn lines as instructed above. Save the file. Exit. Back at command prompt: "attrib +r +s +h boot.ini" restart the machine.

OEMPreinstall need to be "Yes"

You can create a custom image for each user that you add. Just name the bmp file after the user. Ex: Administrator.bmp; Guest.bmp; Richard.bmp; etc. Add the files to your install CD as mahi describes.

Here are some more details on the machine... The model number is "Flexatxstc Bro Essential 900" Manufactured on 8/9/01. It appears to be using the i810 chipset. What I think is the BIOS chip is socketed and has this on it: "Intel N82802AB8 A0390133"

I'm having trouble with an older Gateway machine that I'm working on for a friend. Its a Celeron based mini-tower with no PS/2 ports at all. The original keyboard and mouse are both USB. In preparation for installing Windows XP I flashed the bios to the latest revision. Upon flashing I restarted and booted into Windows Me just to make sure everything was ok, which it was. So then I went to completely wipe the BIOS settings via jumper (as you should always do after a flash). When the machine boots up now I get a warning that the CMOS values are invalid (not uncommon) and to press F9 to enter the BIOS or press F1 to continue. The problem now is that the keyboard/mouse do not respond at all. I've tried using a different USB keyboard/mouse (wired and wireless) and nothing seems to work. I would suspect that these peripherals require USB legacy mode to be "ON" in order to work, yet you cannot get into the BIOS to turn this on without a USB keyboard!! I've Googled this issue and there are a few others that have had this problem yet I cannot find any solutions. The Gateway webiste is of -zero- help as well. Does anyone have any suggestions? I've had this computer forever and I need to get this worked out! Thanks in advance.

Hi, Just wondering if there was a definitive list of things that I could retire from SP1 CDs now that SP2 is available. That is, what does SP2 come with that I had to add manually to SP1? So far I think these are included in SP2: .Net framework WMP 9 Directx 9c MovieMaker 2? Beyond that I don't really know... How about hotfixes? Can I remove hotfixes up to a certain date?

Or you slipstreamed MsBlast or Sasser worms onto your CD. Search through your install files for the word "shutdown" and remove it if you'd like. You can also go to the command prompt and type "shutdown /?" to figure out the switches.