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Looks like one of the security/privacy patches has done you in. It must have changed the way USB devices are recognised & installed. It might help to read the notes on all the patches you have incorporated & remove ones related to usb devices. Altough I don't particularly care for usb only support mobos. They are the biggest culprits in security lapses & data theft in corporate environment. I would prefer the old style USB header type mobos ( without these headers) where an employee has no way of stealing data.

Hibernation is simply a process of saving your memory state to the systemroot directory for faster reboot/restore of your working environment. It has nothing to do with how much ram you have.The hiber.fil will be the same size as the amount of ram you have. If your system is functioning normally it should also hibernate it you see the option & turn on the support in power properties. Most likely possibility is insifficient diskspace. You can try & empty the recycle bin & as an added safety measure run chkdsk on your drive. Just for your information, I have been using this feature for last 5 years on a machine with 1.5 gb of ram.

Create a fresh iso without the winnt.sif & it will work. Simply copy the required data from this file for manual input.

If its a serial ata drive & you disable serial support in bios the system will not even see the drive. Chances of sata support on 2 year old mobo are remote but not unknown. I have had one similar problem in the past with Intel mobo. It supported usb natively. After a while if would not boot or allow install if I had usb support turned on. There was nothing I could do to retrieve the mobo. Ultimately I simply had to junk it. From what little I know of Gateway they have always used Intel mobos. Try turning off all hardware peripheral support except the ide for your hdd & cdrom. It just might work.

I have been using a paid copy of BootItNG for last 3 years . It is a fantastic boot & partition manager. The current version supports DMA, SATA, USB2 & IEEE1394. It can directly image your partition to any removable cd/dvd media. It can undelete partitions. What you download as a trial is a fully functional version. I can practically swear by it. This is what permits me to have 5 versions of Windows & 9 flavours of Linux in independent partitions on a single hdd. I juggle resize my partitions at least once a weekto try a new flavour of linux or some changes in unattended install.

Auto Partition on or off only asks your confirmation where it is supposed to install. I have never allowed the unattended process to actually partiton the HDD. I always create formatted drive C: & then only boot will full unattend cd making sure this is the only visible partition. I have 5 different versions of Windows & more than 9 versions of Linys installed and running on my system. Can't afford to have anything mess it up.

Try Cathy. It does an excellent job of indexing your system as well as all the CDs youcan rhrow at it. It is FREE.

I thought on oem versions you were not even supposed call M$.

Hibernate is no different from normal shutdown as far as the power state of the machine is concerned. Only difference is that the memory state is stored on the hd to restore it when the machine powers up. Unless you are using static IP you can run into problems with networking. Wake on lan would be required for administrative purposes after hours when no one else is working on the machine.

Simply boot to dos 7.x from cd. Use fdisk & make the windows partition active. Format it to fat32 & set it as active. Next boot your installation cd. Your winxp should install normally. You will have to use use your Suse installation cd to reactivate/reinstall grub. Hope this helps.

As I said I created an sp-1 disk just for the purpose. I have been using slipstreamed sp2 disks for a while. Finally I used the sp-2 disk. It started an installation process but simply did some kind of maintenance. The system is simply back up as sp-1. Thanks.

Generally when no cd is included with the pc the restore image/info is stored on a hidden partition on the hdd. If you fully formatted the hdd you may have lost this data & rendered the pc non restorable.Suggest you contact the oem to obtain a cd.

My experience tells me that it depends a lot on the manufacturer of the thumb drive & the chip used. Generally the first time you connect any particular thumb drive you will get this dialog box. Once it has been identified & added to its database it will simply mount it the next time it is connected. But afterall you know the beast you are dealing with. It can change behaviour on a daily basis.

Try TerabyteUnlimited's BootItNg boot & partition manager. It is fully functional during trial period & beyond. Simply use maintanance mode at the first sceen & then partition manager at the second screen. The drive however must be connected to the usb port before you boot. It allows full management of usb/IEEE1394 connected mass storage devices. I have done it with regular desktop hdd with the software installed on the pc, not while booting from a cd/floppy as you might have to do. I had to do it as my mobo bios did not fully support the drive capacity. Laptops might be a different story. I am not much familiar with 2.5" drives & do not know if there is any such thing as setting it as master/slave. If there is it must be set as master. Hope this helps.

This should have been your first warning. Your bios definitely does not support 48 bit lba access. You do have a simple solution though. Get hold of an external USB casing for your hard disk. Make sure it is set as master. All partitions & files will be visible.

If the key you have is not a retail version but an OEM the key gets invalidated automatically if you change the motherboard. This is part of OEM licansing.

Let me assure you that ghosting definitely works. In fact it even works in difficult situations. As long as the hdd space on the recipient partition is larger than that occupied by the os on the partition that is being hosted. What you need to do is create a primary partition on the recipient disk large enough to receive the data from the ghost image. Set it as active & the system will also boot normally. As an example I have successfully made compressed ghost image of a 4 gb system drive on which the occupied space was only about 1.5 GB. I restored this image on a 8 gb primary & active partition. It made no changes to the MBR, did not change the size of the partiton nor screw up the fat. I have also restore this ghost image to a 3 gb partition successfully. I used to use this method on earlier OSes like 98 & ME. In those cases I would boot into safe mode. Go to device manager & delete all components. Shutdown the PC & create Ghost image. Once this image was restored & the system was booted the os would go through the process of detecting all the hardware & install appropriate driver. On 98 it was a bit of a pain since all the hardware drivers were not natively available but ME never posed a problem. In case of XP this procedure was not possible since you could not simply delete/uninstall devices in the device manager. Switching to the generic mode for IDE & Video adapter before creating the ghost image did the trick. But there is one caveat with this procedure. You MUST boot into safe mode at the first boot otherwise you will run into problems. Even under safe mode the OS will detect the hardware & insatall necessary driuvers. You can then reboot normally. I have also used this method to transfer hard disks from intel mobos to athlon mobos.

By default I move the My Documents folder to D drive on newly built systems so naturally the user files get saved there in stead of system drive. I also disable system restore for this drive. I even set this folder for internet downloads. In situations of disaster it is a simple matter to reformat c: & do a fresh install. Data never gets affected.

Thanks for your quick response. I created an SP-1 Disc but did not get the option of "repair". Then I tried SP-2 disk. Same result. Having already retrieved the client data using BartPE & USB pendrive I tried to go ahead and freshly install in windows.0 directory. Windows installer did some kind of system maintenance & rebooted from the HDD. To play it safe I opted for safe mode GUI & the system came up. With great patience I uninstalled a lot of the unnecessary software that I could and rebooted. Finally the system came back to normal. Apparently what the client had done was remove the nVidia addon graphic card due to hardware problem & switched to on board via graphics. Now the million dollar question. Is this option of repair install a function of installed OS or the boot CD? I have done repair installs on a number of SP-2 systems but that option was altogether missing in this SP-1 installation with both versions of CD.

I have a sort of an emergency. I have a client in a remote location who has SP-1 installed & never upgraded to SP-2. The PC has suddenly developed some problems & won't boot into the OS even in safe mode. After listing out all the drivers being loaded it simply reboots. I was wondering if it is possible to repair it with an SP-2 CD or do I have to create an SP-1 CD? Laying hand on the original disk would entail at least 3 days delay. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I also found a simple method of doing it after studying several fora for transferring HDD from one PC to another evenwith different hardware. Install xp normally. Change the ide driver to generic version. Change the graphic driver to standard xvga. Shutdown. Do not reboot. Make a ghost image of this partition. Dump this image onto a new partition. Boot into SAFE MODE only. Unles you have exotic hardware windows will detect & laod correct drivers for both. Yoy can then reboot normally. It should work OK. It does for me.

I beg to differ. Windows will assign itself 169.254.x.x ip address if it cannot find a dhcp server on the network. In this event you might try a different aproach. Uncheck "obtain an IP address automatically". Go to one of the other PCs on your network & check out its IP address. Copy the same while changing the last set of digits. You might get an error message of conflict. You might have to try several different values to arrive at one which works. Start with 250. Another thing you might try is disable the built in ethernet in bios. Uninstall your NIC in device manager while displaying hidden devices. Go back to bios & enable your nic. Windows should detect & install your nic. If both these fail call your hardware vendor.

I use a 4DOS batch file - now available for free - for all such backups & copying. It is an extremely powerful shell.

The difference might be all the garbage left behind after SP-2 upgrade.

This is a DNS issue of sorts (dnscache). You can try to repair your network connection which flushes all the data & could solve your problem. It could also be intermittent connectivity issue. Check with your isp.