Tripredacus

Ah but it took so much work! Anyways, so I am guessing it is supposed to have some code in it then? I have come up empty on finding any white papers or support documentation for POSReady 2009. I suppose for now I can just report this as a bug, but it is strange that I would find it considering the age of the product. I attached them anyways. Mbrs.rar

I feel silly. You are correct. Sadly MBRWORK was run from a 1GB USB key that boots to DOS 7.1... and it captured that MBR. Unfortunately, it does not seem to see the RAID volume. Let me choose to "Change the Disk" and put that MBR up instead. In addition I will get the MBR after MBRfix, and also the MBR of the POSReady 2009 install using IDE mode instead of RAID. BACK1.rar

TBH, using Acronis is probably going to be the easiest and quickest way to make a recovery partition. Anything else is going to involve quite a bit of testing and some programming ability.

Welcome to the MSFN!

This song brings back memories! And One - Panzermensch

For technology I will agree. If you try looking up sports injuries or body parts/muscles you do not know, that is another story! While I agree to a point, everyone has their specialties. I think that given time, Jaclaz can possibly replace google since he has all the relevant links, while google likes to toss a bunch of other things in there, especially when it does that "we searched for this instead of what you typed, click here to actually search for what you typed in." crap.

I see that a lot of people try to use AutoIT to automate installs, even if said installs can automate themselves. Have you checked to see if you can do an unattended install of this product that includes an option for that setting? In addition, if the setup is recordable (like InstallShield) check that out. Also, I'd try to stay away from using coordinates in AutoIT scripts, as those values are dependent on every instance having the same resolution and the dialog boxes being in exactly the same place every time. You can try out your app using the InfoTool and (hopefully the install is Modal) you can specify actual buttons rather than resorting to screen coordinates.

I am starting up an installation now, albeit on different hardware.. (previously mentioned notebook with RAID enabled) The CD boots to a command prompt, where I can type "install" to begin setup. Prior to doing that, I decided to run ver which returned: Windows 5.2.3790 After my struggles to get this installed (it isn't very fun) I will try to get a copy of the MBR for ya. Update: I can't recreate the issue with this notebook. It is booting every time. I will try going back to the original hardware... Perhaps it works differently when there is a mirror involved. BTW all the questions it asks in setup is used to build an answer file that is used during the actual setup. Among them is an option that lists the drive type, and even if using RAID mode (at least on this notebook) it says the drive type is IDE. Update 2: It appears the notebook itself is a root cause for some of these strange behaviours. The "RAID" setting does not operate in the same way it does on the desktop board. While it is still puzzling that the WinPE detects a broken mirror consisting of the HDD and the Card Reader, this is likely due to the fact that these Realtek Card Readers are capable of getting a drive letter without media being inserted, and that they run on the USB bus. Why specifically WinPE thinks the card reader is a 500GB drive is unknown. In addition, oddities also found are the following observations: 1. Notebook set to RAID, but XPe setup sees the HDD as IDE mode. 2. Notebook set to RAID can boot the finished RAID image without error. 3. Notebook set to AHCI or IDE will receive a 0x7B when booting the RAID image. 4. Notebook set to RAID will boot the install DVD without a problem. 5. Desktop set to RAID will receive a 0x7B when booting off the install DVD. So it would appear that the Notebook doesn't really use its RAID function 100% while running in JBOD, or that the RAID setting isn't really a setting at all, except that it can boot XPe images that have only a RAID driver in them. Another strange thing is that by default, on the full install of this OS, Disk Management is not included! Either way, since this is going back to my original question regarding the inability to boot after setup, I will move this topic back into the XP forum and merge it with my original topic. Update 3: I was finally able to reinstall POSReady 2009 and get the flashing cursor back. It is a real pain! Here is the screenshot of Disk Management from Make_PE3, which did not prompt to format or import. It got a drive letter and all files were visible. See attached for first track BIN file as created by MBRWORK. BACK0.rar

Older versions as well as the deprecated Matrix software required a RAID controller to be present. The newer versions of IRST will install on a system that only has IDE or AHCI options in the BIOS. I haven't seen a system without AHCI for a while so not sure if it would install on a controller with IDE as the only option.

Since this has moved away from being an XP question and become more general... since the inclusion of Windows 2000 and Debian, I'll stick this in Software Hangout.

It would take a bit of work in order to update your recovery partition with a new snapshot. If it is a SoftThinks partition, you won't be able to do it without a license key. If you are lucky it will have a WinRE in there.

You could just change the date in your BIOS and block Windows time synchornization... Of course Windows Update won't work with such a configuration.

After taking a look, it would appear that POSReady2009 may have a unique Setup method that is definately not exactly normal compared to XP at all! From what I can tell, this POSReady install is just like a Vista install, including the "browse" option to find Mass Storage drivers. It's "PE" or whatever shell setup runs from does indeed support USB PnP like WinPE 2.0+ does. Looking at the disc contents, it looks to be a transition type setup that combines BOTH XP and Vista style setups. This means it does have an i386 folder and a WINBOM.ini that you would normally see on an XP install CD, but it also has a WIM file as well. As far as checking it after every step, I don't see that as being viable, since I wasn't able to get any programs to run in it... which is why I switched to the WinPE v2.1 (x86) to run MBRFIX, since it wouldn't run in the PE that ran Setup. I can try to do a reload tomorrow to see if I can get some behaviour from Disk Management using either Make_PE3 or even another HDD with Windows 7 on it.

Ah the reason why I made a separate post was mainly to inquire why putting this image (from a .wim) onto a notebook with 1 HDD installed would end up reporting that the Card Reader was the second drive in the mirror. As far as the "Setup" it involved making the "ISO" (its not an ISO truly, we have the pressed disc from MS) boot from a USB key. This let us then put the iaStore.inf (and related files) into the appropriate folders as directed by our instructions. This only bypasses the "F6" method (which is just a button similar to selecting drivers in a Vista setup) which also ends up doing the same thing as well. The underlying "idea" before about needing to erase the MBR to test deploying the image was done (after my above post) using Terrabyte Lab's MBR.EXE which has a /Zero option. Anyways, after zeroing the MBR, i was able to deploy the RAID image onto the notebook, and booting resulted in the 0x7B again. But I got sidetracked... When I found I can set the notebook to RAID mode, which ended up that I could boot into this XP image... Which then resulted in a one hour crusade to determine a way to connect a second HDD to this notebook... But I haven't figured that out yet... A project for later.

Here is a strange situation that I've found, and so far have only found it in WinPE v2.1 (x86) and WinPE v3.0 (x64). Other versions may be affected as well. First a little story of what I am dealing with here. Or to sum it up. It appears that Windows XP Embedded POSReady2009, while it does support RAID drivers, it doesn't write the MBR if you install it with those drivers. It does write the MBR if you install using a default (IDE mode) driver, which is a problem entirely on its own. The end result is I have captured a POSReady2009 (RAID) image to my WDS. Since it is known that Imagex does not capture MBR code when creating an image, it is entirely possible deploying this image on a brand new (blank) HDD will result in the client not booting. To test this theory out, I deployed the image onto a notebook, which is currently set for AHCI. i was hoping for a 0x7b error, which I was able to get. HOWEVER, this HDD previously had an OS on it, so its MBR would have data in it already. I was about to test out erasing the MBR so that I can test the RAID image on it, when I found this oddity. Even though there is only 1 HDD in this system, WinPE (and Diskpart) is reporting that there are two HDDs in the system. Is this normal? My Gimagex HTA is showing them as such: C:\system (Hard Disk) NTFS Size: 2GB / 466GB E: (Usb-Drive) Size: 2GB / 466GB C: is accessable and I can see the files, but E: is not accessable. Upon attempting to access it, I receive: Diskpart is even fooled to believe there are two physical disks in the system as well. A LIST DISK returns: Disk 0 Online 465 GB 0 B Disk 1 No Media 0 B 0B When I do a LIST VOL, I can see that E: is of type "Removable" which is certainly correct, as the E: is a card reader! However, once having this RAID enabled image on it, portions of WinPE seem to want to attribute the second portion of the "broken mirror" to the card reader?

I'd expect (presuming Microsoft was telling the truth) that I'd still be using Windows 8 x128 by 2038. Only because the "idea" of having a PC with an exabyte of RAM is such a mind-boggling yet fascinating idea. And to add in the fact that it would likely take me 25 years to save up enough money to buy that much RAM... Or at least a motherboard with 1 billion RAM slots on it.

IIRC, the password in AutoIT is only for their decompiler that is meant for AutoIT v2 executables. It was this entire purpose (they lock topics over there if you ask about it) that this function was removed in v3, although you can still put a password in it. But this password does nothing for other decompilers.

bphlpt, your avatar now has an optical illusion to it. It would appear that the "data sphere" is not a circle, especially where the man overlaps it. However, it is a proper circle.

I was reading about this on Sophos, but they seem to be saying there is more talk about this than actual reported infections. Although that may be related to most scanners' inability to detect it.

CurrentControlSet isn't available in an offline hive. Its typically going to be the 001 that you want to edit but you'll have to do some testing. I've sometimes have had to change 002 or 003 to get settings to "work". EDIT: beat me to it.

I'll add in here that the original RenderWare works in Win98FE. I want to say Lightwave as well, which I used to have on my Win98 to assist in building RenderWare objects, since the original RW wasn't very intuitive.

There is a good possibility that whatever computers are around in 2038 (or 2099 for that matter) may not even be able to run something like Windows XP.

We certainly do have a lot of info about Win9x here.

Would it be wise to block RDP ports on systems that aren't configured to use it, at least until a common fix is available for this worm?