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All you guys have major project coming up Enlighetening your Vista , sorry nLiteing Vista.

I am not surprised by San Disk's response. Back in 2000 I bought a CF card reader made by them. Not one of the drivers on the included cd worked. I had to download them from their site during the good old days of dial -up -networking @ 2-2.5 kbytes per second & no resume. Removing the fragments of the already installed drivers involved yet another download of equal pain. Since then I have not bought a single product of San Disk. On the other hand my experience with DataFab was excellent. Although officially unsupported these worked even on Macs out of the box without drivers. You can also buy SimpleTech (rebranded Datafab product at lower price) which works with Linux, all versions of windows & Macs. Except on Win98 you would not even require addon drivers. In present times it is always wise to visit vendor's site & make absolutely sure that the product is fully compatible with your hardware & OS otherwise be prepared for cluttering your desk drawer. They are not even heavy enough to be paper weights.

I came across something similar a while ago. After setting up a new system I delivered it to the client. It was working flawlessly at the workshop. After opening the cabinet I noticed that the sata connectors had shifted/moved ever so slightly that would not be noticeable. When I pushed them home again the pc started functining properly. In future I am going to make sure that once I have connected the sata cables to the drives I tape them down with gaffer tape. These are the worst kind of connectors I have come across. All these big time overpaid engineers apparently are idiots when it comes to a simple thing like designing foolproof connectors. Same holds true for the power connector too.

Download bootitng from terabyteunlimited. The current version also includes a utility to either create an iso or writing out a floppy disk. Boot from it & at the first screen opt for maintenance instead of install. Select partition manager. You will see all the partitions on your hdd. It can also find & undelete partitions in the free space area. Select any one & select properties. Click on edit file & you will see contents of your partition. This should help you locate & select the partition you want to set active for your system to boot properly. Hope this helps.

Most of the current mobos do. I will try & remember to experiment with it. Thanks.

You don't need a vbs script. There is a compiled app available called xp_change.exe Which will do a very proper job of it as also a good dialog box.

You should look up some resources on the net relating to creating BartPe with the XP source file being on the hard disk. You can also look up on slipstreaming. All of them very clearly mention then using windows own copy command or functionality will expand the files & you would never be able to get them back on the cdrom 0f700 mb. You have to use some kind of file manager to do it. I use Total Commander. What you might try is using winrar or the like to create one single exe file to contain all the files you want on your hdd. Run this file from runonce to extract to their original size as on the cd & then delete the original copy of the rarsfx. Rarsfx can be programmed to selfdestruct after extraction as well as predefining the extraction destination.

Yes it will work but the second part of installation still remains to be completed. On the whole you haven't saved a whole lot of time. Better option would be to do it a bit differently. Do a complete install. Chnge the graphic & ide drivers to generic ones. Edit your boot.ini so it would boot in safe mode. Now make a ghost image. You can now restore this on practically any machine, it will by default boot into safe mode & load the correct drivers for the graphic & ide hardware. If you need any special drivers they can always be loaded later. You must remember to restore the boot.ini to subsequently boot Normally & not in safe mode.

I personally do not have any problem with this on my own machine. I am using BootItNg as my boot manager. Regardless of the kind of boot/install cd I make I religiously use BCDW & my boot manager as one of the booting options which simply reactivates itself & I am back in business. It is the client machine I am concerned with. PC penetration where I live is not high but it is climbing. There is no such thing as regular yearly or bi-yearly upgrades/replacements. People keep using what they have - as long as it serves their purpose - accounting, internet, email & a little bit of word processing - a la wordstar 7.0 for dos- until it dies. There are still machines over 10 years old & running windows 95. They are comfortable with what they have. As & when they do get a new one or finally upgrade they want their old environment exactly as it was. They get familiar with XP at their leisure. Quite a few also want Linux to get familiar with it. In such cases I have to use one of the freebie boot managers for dual/triple booting. Not all are easy to restore. If there is an occassion or need for a repair/install the boot manager has to be reinstalled/reactivaed. If one could simply avoid this overwriting bit it would save a lot of hassels. I do not wish to revert to my old system of making c: drive bootable to dos with cdrom drivers & then start dos initiated install. It does prevent overwriting of the mbr but is too slow & time consuming.

This is going to be a tough one as both will have to share your Programs folder on the CD.

What files/folders do you have within your iso & what are the contents of your autoexec.bat & config.sys files?

Are you insisting on booting from an actual floppy or a floppy image on cd? If from floppy you might be able to do it with 2.88 mb floppy + stacker from old days. If from floppy image on cd that is a very simple matter. Anyway why do you insist on sound card driver on floppy? I can't figure out the logic.

I am using MagicIso for creating the iso images with optimize option. It also takes care of the extra long names in manifests folder. It always prevents file duplication on the CD when combining xp installation with BartPE.

If my data is off my c: drive it is a simple matter to simply restore a ghost image in the event of non-repairable corruption, virus infection or any such disaster. Most of the clients use outlook as their contact & email software. At shutdown a batch file automatically copies the .pst file to a location on one of the logical drives. The idea is to do a fast fix without having to Worry about retrieving data which can reduce one's lifespan. By the way I am using a boot manager which has allowed me to have 6 different vesrions of windows & over 9 different flavours of Linux - each in their own independent partitions without encroaching on each oher or sharing except the extended partition. This also allows me to test my unattended CDs in actual working environment - not in vmware or so. Using ext2fs on my personal machine would be ok but never on a client's machine. Should the driver be corrupted they would be absolutely miserable. They practically never use dual booting option. I can set absolutely any volume as hidden volume, which shows up as free space under "disk management". Although I tinker with Linux I am no giru. I have never been comfortable with grub & stick to lilo in the root partition itself & never in the MBR.

Is there any entry possible in winnt.sif or other configuration file that will prevent XP installation from overwriting the MBR? It would be extremely useful for multiple OS users. Not al boot managers permit easy reactivationof the menu system. Even an undocumented commandline switch from a dos initiated install would be OK. Thanks.

HardLinkShellExt is exactly what I need. Where do I get more info on this? I am not looking at accessing & running these files. What I am trying to do is say have several different versions of BartPE on 200mb mini cd. One with say only latest antivirus software. One with harddisk tools. One with file mangers. I am trying to create unattended installation CD/DVDs with different softwrae packages out of which a substantial number are the same. With hard links as you say I have to undate in a single locatin & my subsequent ISO builds will be updated too.

http://www.diskcleaner.nl/ Freeware. No installation required. Run it with scheduler at regular intervals. Just might do what you want.

Speaking on strictly personal experience Linksys products & drivers have been major disaster experiences for me, Cisco'c reputation notwithstanding. A while ago I picked up a 4 port switch with dual port print server at a decent price. The d****d thing would never print more than a single page & invariably hang. I tried configuring it in every manner possible. Now it is simply gathering dust. I stick with DLink as practically all products work without problems & most with Linux also.

I was wondering if there is any kind of utility or functionality available for XP that will allow dynamic link style copying of files. I experiment with a lot of different versions of bootable CDs. Most often a substantial number of files are the same in different versions/configuratins. Optimizing of files - prevent duplication- is easy within an iso but how about on the PC itself. When a newer version of some exe file is made available - 7z for example - on the net I want to simply save it in one single location - of course I would have to rename it to conform. I hate like hell to go & find all the location & copying them manually. The worst part is it fills up my HDD very quickly. Even dynamic links to folders alone would also be ok. Any help links/guidance would be most appreciated. Title edited -- Please, use [TAGS] in your topic's title. --Sonic

As I said this happened by error & not by intention. Firstly I had no extra free & unpartitioned space on the hdd. The CD happened to be an autoinstall cd with autopartition set to on & install drive set at c:. As a rule I only create one single primary fat32 partition of 8 gb as C: drive to keep cluster size at 4k & easy excess to it in the event of some problems. Subsequently I create other logical drives & move my temp, & my documents folders plus the pagefile to them to maintain maximum free space on c: drive.

This is windows specialty. If the nic is showing as connected and your browser complains that "page not found" you can right click on the network connection icon in the systray & select repair. It just might solve problem. It has something to do with caching of dns & other data which needs flusing. I have never faced this problem with Linux.

I have done a few repair installs & haven't lost any data nor even the settings. Your best bet would be to boot with BartPE cd & connect a sufficiently large pendrive to retrieve your data. If you are truing to save your programms repair install is the only way to go.

You can set it by simply going to control panel - system - advanced & selecting the environmental variable at the bottom. You can add, edit or delte required settings here. I always change this to set my temp file to an independent 5 gb partition created for this purpose. Keeps your c: drive neat & clean. You can also set user specific environment here. No need to tinker with the registry.

I had a strange situation once. The basic installation refused to boot even in safe mode. Wanting to do repair install I by error booted off a cd that had winnt.sif set for auto partition. The installation process completed automatically & I did not interrupt the istallation & from fear that it might ruin the system entirely. What I ended up with was the boot.ini, ntldr & ntdetect on the primary partion & the rest - windows, documents & program folders on d drive - very definitely a logical drive since there wasn't enough space on the original c: drive. There was also an additional entry in the boot.ini for this second installation. I think this is one of the ways to have multiple windows installations on a single HDD, win98 + xp. Since it picked up all the settings from the original installation - desktop, programs & what have you I simply deleted the old boot.ini entry & the windows folder on c: drive & I was in business. I did not actually plan it but I did end up with installation on logical drive. What you can try is start off with a resonably small primary partition & a sufficiently large logical drive & see how it goes. It might even prompt you to select a logical drive if you have more than one. You can always resize the c: drive later on using partition magic or the like.

Try one of the applications included in dos version of free UBCD. Simply boot to dos & leave it on for a while. Another thing you can try is disconnecting your internet connection. I have observed in a number of cases where a poor connection gave more problems then anything else.