I'm Finally ugrading my OS and Computer to Win XP Home !!

[Nelson37]

I thought that was Vhelp's case.

What the tech told you about activation was wrong. Regardless of Internet connection, if you do not activate, the PC will cease to boot in 30 days.

Microsoft will confirm this and I have personally tested, yes, it will fail.

Activation can be done over the phone, without using the Internet.

[Webster]

That's a photo from a year ago. I have two more PATA drives in there at present, stuffed into the 5 1/4" slots with adapters. The 300GB PATA drives were on sale for ~$75, so I bought a bunch of them. Next version will be SATA. There are 4 case fans to keep it all cool. That computer weighs about 60lbs.

Can you make toast from the air exaust of that box?

[redwudz]

Webster, it does help keep the room warm. But it only runs a few hours a day. I was surprised a 450W power supply handles all those drives with no problem. It runs fairly cool. The fans in front of the hard drives really help keep their temps down, especially when you stack them in there that close.

Nelson37, that's been my experience with activation also. I put XP64 in a computer I rarely use and a month later it refused to boot because I hadn't activated. It wasn't plugged in or running, so it apparently goes by the install date. A PITA, as I had to call MS (India branch ) and explain the situation before they would give me a new number to use.

[vhelp]

Evening everyone

Wow, Stand By mode is great. Last night, I selected it just to see what
would happen..

** System shuts down HDD's and MOBO
** A light on my power supply case (blue) blinks.

..and that's it. But the light on my case is very bright, and could attriact
curious lurkers at night. I put the "Do Amazing Things"** cover over it and
it did the trick to reduce this side-effect. ** that's where some cd disc is kept
inside the sleeve, for some offer of apps or something. I don't know.

Anyway, when I got home this evening, I just pressed the power button
and the think nearly came right up, instantly. Maybe 5 seconds later.
Nice.

Ok. On to other things..

I decided to just go do the Activation thing and get it over with.
I've choosen to do it through the phone. I'll report back how long
it takes to go this way.

In the mean time, while I go and make that call, now.., could someone
please help me with imaging this new setup ??

It looks like XP does not come with any DOS anything. So, I can't
boot into dos (I stupidly thought I could and tried) So..

I've been searching the net for freeware imager tools. Nothing big or
bloating. I saw WinImage, and D/L'ed several versions. But, I only
did that out of hast cause I was running late this afternoon from work
and I didn't want to show up at home, empty-handed. So, I'm not sure what
I have nor how to use it. But I'll use anything, if its small and easy
to use.

What I want to do soon as I can, is make either a bootable CD/DVD disc
or mem/flash stick, and use that as the initiator to image my C:\ drive
and then (when the time comes) re-image when I need to revert back to
a healthier state.

I have norton Ghost 7.0 but it is not helping at all, and I need to have
a Floppy disk, which I do not have and am not plugging any such
drive into this unit. I settled with mem/flash stick instead. So
floppies is out of the question.

Thanks for the help, everyone.

-vhelp 4251

[Nelson37]

Boot from a win98 CD and then run ghost, if necessary copy the ghost files to another CD.

Works fine for me.

There is a freeware prog, HD-clone or something like that, which does work though it still needs a boot CD and it is a LOT slower than ghost.

Yep, DOS is all gone. Many older apps can still be run from the command line, but DOS is run as a program on top of XP, as oppossed to being the actual lower level OS, as in 98.

[vhelp]

Ok. I'm back. I've successfully Activated my Windows XP Home edition.

It only took under 7 minutes to complete.. plus writing
this all down so that anyone who's curious or in the same boat as I,
(long-time procrastinator) will be at ease. I'll keep a copy here, below
to share with others considering this method.

-vhelp 4252

[vhelp]

.
.

The process to Activate Windows via (automated) Phone: 1.888.571.2048

A-- you have to be in the Activation window. During 30day trial, an icon
is placed in your sys tray. When you hover over the it, (you'll see a
small baloon message, "30 days, 29 days, 28 days.." etc., depending on
how many days you've ben procrastinating.

B-- Next, you call the 1.888.571.2048 phone number. An automated
spreaker (mine was a women) will ask you a couple of short questions. I
spoke into the phone. That's how easy that was.

C-- Next, when asked, (after a brief inqury about where you live, etc. you
will be asked to input (via voice or phone keys) the product number on displayed
on your computer screen (in the activation window) to the phone. Speak clearly.

D-- This part is faily easy. The automated person will give you a
series of grouped digits to enter in as your new product number or something,
and you will enter each group into each text box in your activation window.

E-- And finally, the last question asked will be if there were any
errors reported when you clicked on the [NEXT] button.

That's it. Activation Complete !!

-vhelp 4253

[vhelp]

Trying to GHOST (make an image of) Drive C:\

If anyone understands what's going on here, I'd appreciate any
advice on how to go further..

Having a hard time getting my Ghost boot diskette (long story, am
using my USB fopply -- forgot about it, hehe) but it can't find
an ASPI cd rom driver on the floppy, after it goes through all
the ASPxxx whatever. I'm frustrated.

Here's the CONFIG.SYS file contents that seems to load (or, check)
every cd rom driver. Mind you, on the first check, it finds a
driver, but it keeps on checking the remainging files and then
finally says it can't find one, even though it *did* find one
at the first try. I'm confused, too.

DEVICE = oakcdrom.sys /D:cd1
DEVICE = btdosm.sys
DEVICE = flashpt.sys
DEVICE = btcdrom.sys /D:cd2
DEVICE = aspi2dos.sys
DEVICE = aspi8dos.sys
DEVICE = aspi4dos.sys
DEVICE = aspi8u2.sys
DEVICE = aspicd.sys /D:cd3
LASTDRIVE=Z

-vhelp 4254

[Nelson37]

You will need to determine which driver is loading, then add the mscdex.exe file, then use the command MSCDEX /dxx, with the label matching the label from the loading driver.

Do this from the command line, not from config.sys.

If you are doing this from floppy, should not be necessary, if the goal is to write to CD, it won't work. No CD tools in DOS. But you can read it with the MSCDEX.

I use this to duplicate drives, you could also make an image file on a second HD, or accessible USB drive. DOS access issues will be a problem.

I just duplicate to an old working drive, that way I can boot right away and/or restore the image from the second drive.

[vhelp]

Ok. Never mind. I figure out what to do. In short, I REMarked
the remaining lines in the CONFIG.SYS file, ie:

DEVICE = oakcdrom.sys /D:cd1
;DEVICE = btdosm.sys
;DEVICE = flashpt.sys
;DEVICE = btcdrom.sys /D:cd2
;DEVICE = aspi2dos.sys
;DEVICE = aspi8dos.sys
;DEVICE = aspi4dos.sys
;DEVICE = aspi8u2.sys
;DEVICE = aspicd.sys /D:cd3
LASTDRIVE=Z

And now everything is working..

-vhelp 4255

[vhelp]

Darn. Abort! It won't ghost to a DVD R (or any dvd, I guess)

Now trying a 4x-10x CD-RW disc.

-vhelp 4256

[Nelson37]

You will not be able to burn to a CD in DOS mode.

[vhelp]

UPDATE: May 5, 2007 Sat 6:47pm

Hi everyone..

So far, so good.

1 - I've been using my new computer with XP Home on it with no problems.
2 - I've also been using my new Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 hdtv/analog tv
capture card with not much trouble* also.
3 - I'm now in the middle of some wintv hacking, and learnt something new, a
posible plus if everything works out for the best with this hack.
4 - there some minor issues with my display.. some videos have 'stair-stepping'

* ok. There were some set-backs at first. Like, XP (crashing) shutting down
on me whenever I would launch WinTV. But I since, fixed this issue that same
evening.

Nelson, I did find the solution to the CD writer issue. In looking at the
specs (above) I was able to burn (2) CD-RW's for the image backup.

Without going into detail here, so far, I like the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 card
very much. Other than a couple of glitches (to work out) the card is performing
flawless in my new system. (a review might be on the horizon)

Other than that, there are others things to iron out here or there. But for
now, I'm quite happy.

Thanks to everyone for the helpful tips you all shared.

-vhelp 4264

[vhelp]

UPDATE: 10/1/2009 -- 2 years, 6 months, and still going strong in XP w/SP2

System is still the same: ECS GeforceE6100SM-M w/ AMD 64 X2 3600+, EIDE 160gig HDD

New Additions:

* I replaced onboard graphics card, been using an ATI 3450 HD least a year now
* still using onboard sound
* replaced 1gig ram w/ 2gig's DDR2 (week ago)
* 1T external HDD, USB-2
* 1T external HDD, USB-2 (so I found another one, cheap)

Future Upgrades/purchases:

* Radeon HD 4350 card, *new* (almost a year) but never opened..too frustrated at moment
* also GeForce 9400 GT 1gig, (last week) but chicken out installing
* Seagate SATA, 3.5" Barracuda, 1TB, 32MB, 720RPM HDD -- not installed yet

I need more hard drive space. I've been chocking on aprox 300MB hdd space. For some mysterious reason, my pc seems to be stealing hdd (swap, maybe) and driving down to 60mb, getting warning messages all the time. I need to find out what is eating my hdd. I had free'ed up 1.5gig space and in a couple of days, it went down to the usual 300mb, little by little each day. Right now, its at 213mb left. Its a mystery. If anyone knows whats going on with that, please enlighten me, thanks.

And, now on to my main thrust..

. . .

I'm not as computer savy as I once were. I know how to connect and do a few other things, but upgrading through advance level is not me anymore and so I haven't kept up to the times of things--they churn too fast for me to keep up..i much prefer to stare at pixels all day, but thats just me and my hobby. Anyway.

I'm starting in a new area in image processing: photo processing software.

I'v seen and am still reviewing several software suites..Photo Impact 13, and PS pro ultimate, or something. I wanted to get CS4 but wow! that suite is like $500 bucks, or $199 for the upgrade, but only if you already have the original--of which I don't have. Anyway.

These suites require lots of HDD space. So, I need to upgrade from my EIDE 160g HDD. So, I purhcased a Seagate 1-T SATA hard drive, it comes with cables and driver, no downloading anything necessary. But I'm not sure it'll work with my 160g EIDE drive..i know some mobo don't alow thing and I'm assuming that mine will not, but I dont' know yet, plus, I seem to have lost my manual. So, I'm turning to you guys for assistance. Anyway. I need to keep the same partitions (for the time being till I can make adjustments) so that I can copy my XP Home Edition in one easy step, I hope. I want to keep everything the same, transparent, for the time being until all is succesfully transfered and I can successfully start up windows XP without a schmitten of trouble. Then I will want to re-partition the drive into a couple of smaller units. I don't capture to it because I do that to my external USB-2 drives, so I'm not concirned with potential issues for that aspect.

Is all this possible or am I looking at a night-mare! If so, then I'll leave things the way they are and return the SATA hdd and forget the photo process software idea for now.

-vhelp 5207

[johns0]

The reason windows is using so much disk space is due to the restore system backup files,you can set system restore to remember fewer days and cut down on the disk space used.Also check your temp files to see if they are being cleaned out.

The 1 tb hd should work with no problems.

[redwudz]

If you mean your ECS MB manual, you can DL it here: http://www.ecsusa.com/ECSWebSite/Products/ProductsDetail.aspx?CategoryID=1&DetailID=68...nuID=1&LanID=9 Easier to read in .pdf format than the paper on anyway.

Some MBs may require you to install a driver to use SATA for a boot drive, but most newer ones don't. If you do have to put one in, a floppy drive is often used for the install. I would probably partition the 1TB first the way you want it and then quick format it and clone the contents of the 160GB drive to it and then unplug the 160GB and see if you can boot from the SATA. If not, then install the driver. Make sure to set the SATA as boot in BIOS. If you don't see it there, then a driver is probably required.

In one of my PCs with a 60GB SSD boot drive, I moved the page file to another drive and installed all the programs on that drive. SSDs need about 50% freespace to operate optimally, so I was running the Vista OS on 30GB with no problems. But just about every program wanted to install something on the boot drive, so it was a constant battle to keep the freespace large enough.

[Bjs]

Floppy drives..? You won't miss them. I quit installing them in computers a couple of years ago.

That's what I thought until I wanted to make a custom Ghost boot Disk

I went through hell trying to create it without a floppy drive

Same here but all systems include floppy drive as it is still retained by bios and there are other options.

1: Vfd
2: Winimage
3:Hxd

[vhelp]

How do I configure XP Home to *not* take any more of my HDD space, for anything ?

When I turned it on a half hour ago, it reported low c: drive space of 160mb. Now I know I've got well over 2gigs left but thats beside the point. I decided to go through the reclaiming whatever space I could and so far it got me back 2gig and counting, its still processing for more space..now at 2.190gigs. I see that it had something to do with the "restore restore" thingy. I wonder if I can shut that down, and maybe a few others. I'd like to just have whatever hdd space I'm left with after xp and other software.

Thank you.

-vhelp 5242

[vhelp]

Question:

* How do I turn off system restore
* How do I configure system restore, or adjust how much hdd space to use

Answer:

1. If on destop: right-click MyComputer, select Properties, select the [System Restore] tab, and then
check [x] Turn off System Restore on all drives. (I prefer all drives because I have no need for restore, but your criteria may be different)

1a.Start\Settings\Control_Panel\System (follow steps above)

2. ..or, click on [Settings] button and adjust the slider to the left.

ahaa! I figured it out..

-vhelp 5245