Teh_Tech

Hi! I am not sure if this is posed in the correct forum, if not please feel free to move it to the relevant section! Right, I have bought a new SATA hard drive off fleebay and am due to receive it tomorrow, now this is my first ever SATA drive I have experienced and need help and advice for setting it up! Its a 40GB drive, and would like this as my main System OS boot drive to replace my current IDE PATA drive. I do not have any other SATA drives, so a RAID/mirror/stripe is not necessary and I would get confused with such! My questions: ** Can I clone my current WinXP partition and simply restore it on the new drive or would I need to do a complete new install? ** I have the SATA Driver Floppy thingy from the mobo manufacturer, can I just add this to the drivers in nLite (I am doing an nLite modded install and I seem to remember a long time ago I had a customers laptop with a SATA hard drive, i just added the SATA drivers to nLite & it worked!) would this work on my desktop machine? ** My mobo is a SATA I revision, (1.5Gb/s) is there any increase of speed compared to my current PATA drive, and would I notice such a speed change? Thanks for your time and I hope to hear back from people soon with the replies! Arty.

Thanks for your reply cluberti! I only just found Vista WAIK thrusday night, but had to wait till yesterday to download it round my old land lady's house as Im just using my GPRS internet at the moment and man its way slow! I will try to find the Win7 kit 2morra when Im back round there, but to be quite honnest, I doubt that I will get far with this as it just goes *WAY* over my head! I have tried countless tutorials & examples, but none work how I would like them to :-( Basically I need a bootable shell like WinPE or BartPE, when it loads up I want it to just run an application that I have made that contains all the tools I would need! With WinPE I have tried to put this said application in the mix, but when I test the iso in VirtualPC, none of my files are there! I really am getting a headache through all of this and Im not sure if I should keep on trying or just make my own DOS boot media as I know I could do it a lot quicker there, but its the old way and Im all about the new!

Hi I have just downloaded the Vista WAIK from Microsoft and installed it, I followed a tutorial from here: http://apcmag.com/windows_pe_20_a_tiny_ver...maintenance.htm and have followed the instructions to make the ISO, I have checked this in Virtual PC but after it loads it just opens a command prompt window titled startnet.cmd and just displays X:\windows\system32 after it loads wpeinit. How do I use this to add and customise the iso with my custom tools and what-not? I have googled & read a few pages on it, but I have found nothing that I can use Please help me!

WHY has this been moved into Windows PE section for? I dont have Windows PE, only Bart's PE Builder which is totally different?!?!?!?

Hi! I have thought hard about where to put this thread, and as it is about Windows XP I thought I would post in here, but by all means feel free to move this to a more appropriate section if necessary! Right, down to my query. would it be at all possible to make my own recovery shell (such as IBM's Restore & recovery)? I know I would have to use Bart's PE Builder for the base of the load as the official shell from IBM is a Windows PE environment, and I have played around with PE Builder so I know what I am doing there. I have thought about it and I would like to use a totally self-customised application(using AutoPlay Media Studio) for the rest of the process, and I am just wandering if i could just call the finished application 'explorer.exe' and replace the standard explorer with 1 that I have created, it would have included tools for partitioning, disc scanning, spyware & virus removal tools (all freeware of course) and my own custom Windows XP install options part, as well as backup & restore options for files on the hard drive... What do you people think? would this work and how difficult would it be to make it all? This would be a perfect project for me if it was possible as I love nothing better than messing around creating basic simple apps and I feel this would be really beneficial and aid in the installation and or fixing problems on my PC's. Any tips, hints, comments and the like would all be very gratefully recieved! Thanks for your time in reading and posting in advance Arty.

Thanks for your reply Kiki and sorry for the wrong section, I was pretty much out of it last night, not much sleep recently, but anyways lol! My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T42, I had a quick look at the OEMScan thing last night, but Im not sure I could figure it out as everytime I tried to do the scan, it would tell me there were missing files in the Lenovo folder, so I did a search and found all the files it said couldnt be found in the system32 folder along with another 1 from CatRoot, but once the files were copied into the Lenovo folder of OEMScan nothing happened! I am currently looking through the other links you kindly provided and will return my findings in due course (new house, no broadband so using my mobile as a modem and painfully slow lol) EDIT: Actually, I think now I understand a bit about the OEMscan utility, I have manually copied the oembios files into the proper folder, now for the important question, how do I call the oemscan program, ie, can I call it from the RunOnceEx.cmd file, would it be possible to call it from within WPI either before or after apps have finished installing or can it just be run from within windows when everything has loaded (ie, double click on it whenever) ? Thanks

Hi all, this is the situation I am in at the moment: I recently got given a laptop for christmas that has XP Pro installed, I also have the system restore CD's as well as the hidden recovery partition on the hard drive, I was really determined to finally see through to the very end an unattended XP setup DVD with all my programs & apps ASAP. I have now completed this, I have nLit'ed it and got windows updates & my apps to work perfectly, it is all good apart from 1 thing, activation! I have tested the DVD in a virtual PC and on my laptop on the original HDD that came with the laptop (I upgraded the HDD as it was only an 80GB) anyways, I have tried every single way described on this site to preserve the activation (saved the wpl.db & registry snippets) and set it to restore this when windows installs, BUT, after WinXP is installed, I get WGAtray come up telling me this version of WindowsXP is not activated, I thinks no worries, I will just make sure all my apps & settings work first to avoid too many activations, but after WPI reboots the PC, I am told I HAVE to activate windows to continue to use it, if I click on OK, it tries to activate, but to no avail as I have currently disabled the network adaptor (I dont like being connected to the net without AV software installed first) and if I click the other button, it just logs me off again, so is there ANY way that works so I dont have to activate Windows everytime I install XP?? Please help as it has taken me a good few weeks of me forcing myself to stick with this project and not just give up, I just need this last piece completed before I can burn the DVD and start using it. Thank you very much in advance for your solutions