pmshah

If you wish to turn on the machines by WOL, you have to change your mode from S1 to S3, thereby possibly increasing the standby consumption. You should use hibernate only if you are using fixed IP addresses. On dhcp addresses you my run into conflicts as the pc will try to grab the same ip address previopusly assigned to it. You can use the daily alarm function of the bios to turn on the PCs. You can use use utility like sleepy to switch off the PCs at a predefined time. It will not disturb during your normal working hours. You could also use utility like 4nt to switch off the machines if the DOW (day of week) is Saturday or Sunday. Of course the best solution would be thin clients but may not jive well the end users.

I too have a MSI mobo which behaves in a funny manner. If I have a thumbdrive plugged into the front panel USB port at the time of booting it simply hangs. If it is plugged in at the the back on the mobo creates no problems. Similarly I can boot from a usb hdd or cd-rom if connected to the rear onboard usb port but not to the front panel usb ports. Strange behaviour indeed. In either case these usb connected drives have to jumpered as Master other wise they won't work.

now to reply to my comment from over a year ago, x64 is the best. its so fast, its based off of server 2003, all my devices/hardware works just fine. i higly recommend it over the 32bit windows. You don't need x64 version windows. I have installed 32 bit xppro on a few Athon64 3200+ running at 2ghz. Everything runs so much faster as compared to Pentium IV & Athlon XPs running at substantially higher speed.

In fact when I wanted to restart or shutdown it asked me why I wanted to do so. It would not allow me unless I provided an answer. I was in US visiting my daughter when it was launched & found it strange that people lined up overmight to buy the $49/= upgrade version. It was actually a half breed between 98 & 2k, basic interface of 98 but missing option of booting to dos and added device driver support. I still install it on some older low spec machines simply for its built in device driver support. I have a feeling that M$ must have been in need of a lot of cash from retail sales & came out with this half baked version. Other than this there was no justification.

I am just curious. What make & model of motherboard are you using? How much ram & power supply capacity? Is it a server board? This apart I always have several copies of windows running on my system. One for my normal work which I never disturb. Others for testing new software, new uodate patches, freshly prepared cd/dvd , visiting dangerous sites, etc. Never use imaging on my own machines since my configuration keeps changing constantly & hardly have the need to reinstall on my main working installation.

Unless your bios supports 48 bit lba access you are asking for trouble. There is a work around for this though. Attach your hard disk to a machine that supports full capacity of your disk. Only create partitions in this , primary & extended, set one of them as active. Now you can move this disk to your pc & install windows. Although the bios will not see the full capacity windows will allow access to the full capacity.

One possible thing you could try is disable usb & cdrom support in your bios. this is of course if you can attach a standard keyboard to the system. Next in device manager under view select show hidden devices. These will show up a semi greyed icons. Select each one individually & uninstall them. One all these hidden devices are gone you can reboot, activate cdrom & usb in bios & xp should find * install all the devices properly. If this does not solve your problem the only alternative would be to get your data out of the system & do a restore with original CD.

First of all hitting the sleep button will not put the machine in hibernate state. It will put it to sleep. If the bios is not fully acpi compliant or configured properly one will have problems in waking the machine from sleep state. To prevent repeating this you should in power properties set up the PC to switch off completely upon pressing the power button. So should you have difficulty in waking the machine you can switch it off gracefully without any errors.

Try right clicking & select open. It that does not work switch to Firefox.

Why not use the ACPI function in the bios itself to switch off the monitor after specified inactivity period? This is not exactly switching off but disabling the v-h synch signals, in effect blanking the monitor. No more burnt images!

I am no expert at running local webservers but from your 1st error line it appears that the target has to be a local webserver on your machine. 127.0.0.1 is your loopback nic address & the 8080 is the usual web access port address. Try to put a # mark in your hosts file before the above referred ip address & see what the response is.

That's why the Ghosting of a partition works for you. I was just stating for anyone else that may be reading this thread that if you Ghost a partition to a partition the MBR is not copied and while the data may be there, it will not be bootable until you do something extra to make it so. For imaging a system this process, while complicated, gets the job done. However as a generic method to install XP I'd stick w/LoveLiteXP's method of a cusotmized unattended install. Considering chee's original question I think we've covered it. He can either A. use an image and live w/in the HAL constraints, or B. create a customized unattended install. What one can do is set the bbot order to 1 : hhd0, 2: cdrom. & the following procedure for a fully unattended ghost restore. If you are using dos version of ghost you can create batch file which will do necessary partitionoing & setting active partition. GDISK can confortably do this. In the first round the process will shift to cd rom. Gdisk will setup your hard disk by ading command line switches & reboot. In the second round it will again shift to cd & restore your ghost image reboot. 4DOS, which is an extremely powerful command shell & now freeware, is eminently suited for on screen displays & creation of this batch file. In third round it will boot from the hdd & will complete installation. You can modify the boot.ini of your original partition from which you created ghosted image to show safe mode as one of the options & wait for you to select it. If image size is not a limiting factor one can also select the option of transferring the installation files to hdd for preparing the initial partition from which ghost image is to be created. Without allowing it to reboot create image of this partially installed xp partition & use it. Rest of the steps remain unchanged.

Just for the record: Actually, "run.exe" has nothing to do with cathy.exe, , it is part of the cygwin utilities: http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/run/index.html It's use is advocated in an article related to cathycmd.exe, though : http://www.virtualplastic.org/html/alt_find.html Cathy homepage: http://www.mtg.sk/rva/ jaclaz I got them both from the same site I believe. Anyway I use it for anything where I do not want a window to open or the user to cancel it.

The idea of using download accellerator is to schedule the downloads. During working business hours on dsl connecrtions we have monthly quotas on downloads but between midnight & 8.00 am there is no linit. So most users prefer to have the system start up & finish downloads during this period. Secondly many sites do permit resume but not multiple threads. They are not very fast either. In such situation dap will download different threads rom different hosts to finish the job faster. I am looking for FREE firewall. As it is customers b***h about shelling out for the OS, leave alone addon software. What I want to avoid are service calls because they were lax in their internet behaviour & ended up with virus/spyware practically killing the machine performance.

I use Nero 6.6.x.x. I have not tried version 7.x.x.x. of nero & do not intend to. Apart from nero I use MagicIso 5.x. If supports extra long file names & paths, not supported by any other reliable software. Only shortcoming is it does not save compilations but only ISOs. This takes up a lot of hard disk space.

This 900 mb option is only available Sanyo's special drives. This would be fine if all possible machines on which this cd is likely to be used also have the same drive.

PC Inspector does not need local installation. You can install it on some other pc. Simply include these files in BartPE & run it. I use Bootitng as my boot manager. I have over 15 primary partitions on. This record is maintained by bootitng in its own database on its own parition. As and when you boot it makes different primary(ies) & extended partition as visible, rest of the space being shown as unused. There is no trace of these paritions in the mbr. Even in this state PC Inspector finds all these hidden (or deleted equivalent) partitions & offers to retrieve files from them. It is definitely worth a try.

Visit the following site for a free recovery programme. It has recovered even from hidden / deleted partitions so long as these were not overwritten. www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm You can also try bootitng from terabyteunlimited. It can undelete partitions without any loss. It operates without any OS loaded. Please do read the help section on undelete partition.

Look for shutdown25.zip on the net. Within this you have 8 different utils to shutdown the system. You can simply copy this ultra small utility on the desktop & double click on it. I have also posted this elsewhere on the forum.

In safe mode run msconfig & turn off all items in startup. Perhaps this will help you in determining the offending application.

Since you tried to install an unsigned driver xp would have created a restore point automatically. Boot to safe mode, select the restore option & you should be back in business. As a rule don't update drivers unless you are having problems with it. The unix motto "don't fix unless broken" holds true for windows also.

There is a collection of very small & free files (winoff25.zip) available which will allow you to normal shutdown, hybernate, reboot & forced versions of the three directly by clicking on it. No need to apply any patch or hotfix. (Mini Shut Down Utilities for Win'9x/ME/NT/2000/XP version 2.5 by Károly Kálmán)

Firts try setting it as master & attach it to the secondary ide channel. Make sure the disk is visible in your bios & shows full capacity. All partitions should be directly visible & accessible. The drive letters are likely to change as c: partition of this disk just might show up as d: under windows. If this fails only solution would be to set it as master in an external usb drive casing. All partitions should be visible. I would not try any disk recovery software before above methods.

Try hitting alt tab to see if any message box is hidden under the wallpaper. Apartfrom this the first thing I would try would be to boot into safe mode & remove Norton system works.

If you believe that then I think that you should learn to read and understand!Where in your response did you use robocopy? You dont know if the questioner wishes to retain specific attributes, owners, acls security etc. Why would they need to install another product in order to do a simple copy exercise? The tools, used by all other responders bar yourself, are already available to the questioner. Downloading and installing another product, for me, when the tools to do the job already exist is not an efficient solution. Did my response use the tools already available to the questioner? Was my response a short single line command? Does my response perform the task required? Please explain, in 'simple' terms what you mean by 'complex'! If you were to read the exact wording of the original request you will see " I would like to use robocopy..." it is not necessarily an absolute must. It is not part of the windows either. What I have suggested is a reasonably small substitute command shell with extremely powerful features including macros & graphical displays. I am an old dos hand (senior citizen at that) who wet his feet in msdos 3.2. We had to practically do everything from the command prompt & writing fancy batchfiles & macros. There are a whole lot of commands available under cmd which are not available under gui. In any case in no way did I mean to offend any one of you.