pmshah

I would be more than willing to pay for the hardware. It is a one time expense. The issue is the recurring monthly charges - a sort of TCO- which can add up to whole lot more. I already have a range of PCs lying around all the way from 500 mhz K6-3 to about 1 gh celerons with plenty of ram. As far as Linux is concerned I have a hard time getting into it too deeply due to time constraints. Even at present my sleep time is curtailed to about 5 hours a day. Thanks. I will do some research and evaluate the posibilities.

Have you tried creating 2 different users with different locale/language options for both persons? It just might work although I have no experience with or know of any windows installation - like Linux - where you have the option of selecting the language.

Drive a: & b: are leftovers from the days of 360 kb floppy drives. One usually held the OS while the other your software & data files. They did change but no one accepted the extra expense. Perhaps the developers were not interested in their succes. You had floppy drives with 100 MB capacity & LS-120 drives with 120 MB capacity. Until they came up with bootable CDs you still had to boot & start the setup from floppydrives. Even though lately the floppy drives have been missing from the PCs you still emulate the same drive to do a whole lot of recovery & istallation work. You could try vfdwin under xp to create virtual floppy, load the image file, edit your files just like a floppy disk save the image file & use a cdrw to test. Any day a much more reliable option then a floppy disk. You can run Ghost from floppy emulated cd rom without a problem.

First of all make sure that the full capacity of your HDD is supported by the mb bios. Secondly never do resizing of the C drive from within windows. I gave up on PM when I lost a partition with all the critical data on it. When ever I wish to resize a partition I generally use the facility provided by my boot & partition manger - BootIT Ng . I essentially use PQmagic only to convert and format a primary win32 format to EXT2 when some Linux systems won't install on unformatted partitions.

I have not had a floppy drive in my PC for over 3 years now. Under win98 dos I used to use a utility called TI which would emulate a floppy drive flawlessly. Under XP I use a utility called vfdwin. It is a win32 version of virtual floppy which works for most of the boot floppy creating applications. For Ghost I simply use a standard win98 boot image, add cd drivers & point to ghost directory to do start ghost. Works very well. In fact quite often I use this conveniently to install OS also.

ASUS motherboards are not too hot on compatibility front. One piece of incompatible hardware will blow your entire OS to bits. I had a major hassle with a SB Audigy card. Then I decided ASUS - never again!

This is nothing unusual under windows, any version. I can access the network drives by mapping them using the usual "net use \\pc\drive" command. Perform all kinds of file transfers / backups. However the PCs under question will not show up in Network places nor can I create new places by browsing. Net view shows only the PCs that are also visible in my network places.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with multilinking of DSL connections. I am in a location where the 256 kbps connections are available at very economic rates. If I want to upgrade to 512 kbps it becomes very expensive. 1 mbps are absolutely out of reach. I can get 4 separate 256 kbps connections including the telephone rent & ISP charges at lower than the 512 kbps service. I need help in this regard. Is there any way at all to multilink DSL connections like in the olden days of Dial up connections? If yes how does one go about doing it? Any help or links would be appreciated. Thanks.

I thought that all versions of dsl are essentially always on type of connections. There is one IP which may be dynamic or fixed connecting to the internet (ISP's choice) & the second one which connects to the pc which again is either dynamic or fixed ( user's choice). There is no need to do anything at all user. Soon as your PC is booted up you are on line.

pmshah has it exactly right... Why wait for WinPE to bootup, although it can be done just like Kilimats had said by using penetcfg. You will add the line indicated below to the bottom of the penetcfg.ini file. But, I think you are wasting time waiting on WinPE to bootup. I have the universal bootdisk on cd that loads the bootfiles into a RAMdrive then ejects the cd (so you can move to the next PC) and finishes the bootup on Ramdrive. You can also use a floppy, but it is not nearly as fast. [NetDrive1] ; Drive = * (to use the first available drive letter) Drive = Y: NetworkPath = \\servername\share UserName = add username here ; Password = (leave it empty to be prompted for a password) Password = add password here [PostNetAutoRun] ; StarupFlag = CommandLine ; StartupFlag is a bit field that can take the following values: ; 0 = run hidden and wait (00 00 00 00) ; 1 = run normal and wait (00 00 00 01) ; 2 = run hidden and don't wait (00 00 00 10) ; 3 = run normal and don't wait (00 00 00 11) 1 = Z:\Ghost\Ghost32.exe The nice thing about the Universal bootdisk (www.netbootdisk.com) is that it autodetects every network card I have in my environment by default (which is around 15 counting laptops). They also have provided a way to add protocol.ini settings to get 100/Full if neccessary. This disk will autolog onto a network (which is not neccessary w/mulitcast) or prompt users each time for credentials. Since you are using multicast you will just provide the sever session name in the command line when you autolaunch ghost. GHOST.EXE -buffersize=32 -sure -rb -clone,mode=restore,src=@mc"session",dst=1 FYI.. we saw a dramatic imporvement when we added the -buffersize=32 line Good Luck, Cliff This is addressed to cliff620. How did you create or where did you download the boot image which will eject & complete the boot process from ramdrive? I am really interested in it. Would appreciate any link or details. Thanks.

I am not familiar with the features of PXE bios or its boot features. I do use magic packets & vnc server/ clients to make changes to normally configured machines. On a fresh machine with no OS how do you gather the mac addresses of each individual machine & identify them for setup. If the PXE bios is smart enough to communicate & take commands as to what image to boot & where to look for it. Secondly I don't thing any enterprise is going to commission 300 machines at one go in fresh condition & then hope the admin group will be able to finish their job remotely without disturbing the normal productivity of the end users, even over the weekend. Would make better sense to line up the new CPUs on a bench using KVM switches & set them up without disturbing anyone else. One would not need to run around in case of some hardware problem with any of the new machines.

If you are booting dos directly from CD & need this prompt you must have jo.sys in the boot image. I am not sure if this file is part of dos 6.22. It is available for dos 7.1 & higher. Under PE you have to enable BootFix.

A floppy boot image for your purpose exactly is readily available on the net. I think it might be configured to boot as a no emulation configuration & then hand over the control to ntdetect for completing the boot process. Very useful if either one of your basic boot files is corrupted.

Visit http://utilsmultiboot.blogeasy.com/. Recovery console is one of the 5 options on the opening screen.

Why do I have a feeling that people like to make life more difficult than it can be. I have another suggestion. This of course is assuming that the 300 machines are identical. Prepare 1 machine exactly as you would like with the network configured as DHCP client. Next put change owner utility in the startup folder. Configure the bios on each machine to boot from HDD as the first option & CD rom as the second. Next create a ghost image of the partition. Create a dos boot cd that will start ghost & restore the image from command line automatically and reboot the machine when finished. You couls use 4dos 7.5 (now free) for any fancy script you want to run under dos.You could also use a conditional command to use gdisk to partition the hard drive if the need be. You would want to create multiple copies of this CD if you do not want to wait at all. Once having started the process you can move to the next machine & get it started. The whole process might take about 15 to 20 minutes. So what you have now is a situation that wil boot the cd on a fresh mahine. Partition the drive if the need be. Reboot if required. Restore the ghost image to the HDD. Reboot from the freshly restored / installed & hardware configured winxp. A prompt will await your input for changing the user. You will have to do some tweaking at each machine for changing the password but essentially you are all done. Once you have setup the machine properly you can delete the ChangeUser utility from the startup folder & remove the CD. If for some reason you want to use assigned IP in stead of DHCP you can disconnect the ethernet cable until you are done & then reconnect once the machines are configured. I don't think there is any faster method of achieving your goal.

I have zero experience with Virtual PC but a lot of it on multiple boot especially dealing with DOS. Have you tried booting the dos image directly? I have practically never had any problems with it. If I need to boot into dos & do something I do it directly, never use memdisk for it. At present I am pressed for time for further experimenting but in the past I have used couple of different methods to install xp as well as 2k from win98 dos boot using winnt32 and norton ghost. Now that 4dos version 7.5 has been made free you can do some really fancy stuff with it from dos boot.

What I have found is that the current version of MagicISO is the best iso handler around. It also handles the extra long name files in the manifest folder on BartPE flawlessly. Their site also describes a slightly different method for creating multi boot, multi win iso files. Might be worth your while to explore this. Perhaps you will not need to place ISOs on the dvd but plain simple files.

This is addressed to jquintino. I suggest you read the latest comments on your site. Might be worth exploring the suggestion.

Yes there was but deleting it did not help. I searched some more and found a vb script by Doug Knox for resetting the default action for all drives/folders to open. Once I ran the script & rebooted the pc evrything started working normally. Thanks.

All of a sudden the default action for my local drive D has changed from Open to Autoplay. It is very irritating to close the dialog box asking for the autoplay file, right clicking the mouse & selecting explore in stead of plain vanilla middle button configured as double click. Searched through the registry but did not find anything. Can someone help ? Thanks.

No it did not ask for CD key. That could be solved through winnt.sif. It saw itself as an upgrade in stead of a full installation & asked for an authantication cd from any other previous version of winddows to qualify, starting from win95. This happens even when I only change the folder name & and add bcdw without using nlite at all. The next attempt will be to add bcdw to a full fledged w2k unattended installation cd including all the non essential folders & files (which installs flawlessly) changing only the name of the i386 folder. Lets see what happens.

You can all kinds of CD-Writers supporting 32x for CD-RW but media is difficult to find & at best dicey. Sanyo announced a writer supporting 900 mb cd natively but did not make much headway in the market since DVDs became so cheap.

First of all if it is simple Win2003-SP1 that you are trying put on the CD & is biggefr than 700 mb you are out of luck. If you have applied the patch to the installation files copied to your hard disk & the folder is larger than 700 mb you are still out of luck. Optimisation works only on identical duplicate files. If you have 2 different file versions both will be copied. I doubt very much if you would find duplicate files on an installation cd. Any way the original microsoft cdimage.exe does a better job than any other iso creator including extra long file names & believe me I have tried almost all of them.

I found an even simpler method. You have a sub folder named dos under your pqmagic installation. Simply copy the folder to the root of your CD compilation & rename it suitably, say pqmagc. Make sure you include all the hidden files also. Create a win98 boot image. Include findcd utility in it. Set the parameter for %cdrom% using this utility. use emm386 /noems & make lastdisk=z in config.sys Add following 3 lines to the end of autoexec.bat %cdrom%: cd .\pqmagic pqmagic.exe Use this image in your multiboot cd. If you can find & use udma dos drivers the pqmagic process speeds up substantially. Works like a charm. In fact I have a created a single image file to do variety of things under dos 7.01 from creation of partitions to installing OS like Win98/ME and 2K.

Your best bet is to use BCDW. 1.50z is your best bet since the latest version is not fully functional the way it is supposed to be. I might have the answer over the weekend. What you have to do though is to lay your hands on the original cdimage.exe file. This file supposedly is for Microsoft's internal use only! It does a really fantastic job of optimising.