Thanks for AF447 - yes, I saw it - hopefully there might be a FDR/CVR in the bits!

I've run into a problem with the usb drive which is going to take a while to sort! I had three back-ups there in 4 partitions - 2 laptops, (mine and Mrs B's), and my desktop. Now I've ***d a partition and I have only desktop and mine, so I'll be in doo doo. I'll reformat the whole thing as one, try the boot bit, and then probably re-backup. Might take a while.

Out of interest I have Vista running on my desktop now in VirtualPC

Good luck. I'm sure you'll get it up and running in no time.

What's the performance of Vista like in VirtualPC? I personally run all my virtual machines in VMware Workstation. Most of the time the virtuals run
in near native performance. I don't, however, have much experience with VPC.

If you run across any difficulties you'll see I'm still lurking between here and
the AF447 thread. (Whilst at work to boot. Bad State worker. Bad! :O:O)

Having never seen Vista actually run (:)) I cannot comment on the speed, but it SEEMS a trifle slow, but not too bad. Took me a while to realise how to release the mouse from inside, though.....:ugh:

I've been in the IT industry for 25+ years now. And I have several friends who do the same. I know of no company, organization or any other entity that has deployed Vista, nor have any that plan to do so. Most are playing the wait and see game as far as Windows 7 is concerned. (I, conversely, run Linux on all my machines. Much to the chagrin of management!)
I personally think that MS played a gambit with Vista and blew it. I think that's one of the reasons why they have "allowed" PC makers the option of pre-installing XP when, at first, they refused to do so. If MS blows it again with Windows 7 this may be the window of opportunity in which Linux finally comes flying through as far as more acceptance is concerned. (most don't realize that Linux can do anything Windows does. Anything. And it doesn't crash! And it has no security holes the size of the Grand Canyon!)

Enough espousing the virtues of Linux.

Hope you solve your issue soon.

....and it's also an utter abortion as a desktop OS for anyone who doesn't have a beard, a red jumper, and a subscription to pipe smokers monthly.

;)

beard, a red jumper, and a subscription to pipe smokers monthly.

That's odd. I don't have a beard (a goatee though. Does that count?).
I certainly don't have a red jumper (my wife would laugh me out of the house) and I don't subscribe to pipe smokers monthly. (I do subscribe to
The Wine of the Month club - does that count too?!!!)

I certainly would not consider SuSE Linux, Red Hat nor Mandriva
abortions of desk tops. Then again, that's my opinion.

My point, albeit missing in the humour, is that if you rang up a temp agency and asked 100 secretaries to come down and sit at 100 Linux desktops and be productive for a day, you wouldn't get any return on your investment.

Do the same task with Windows, and you'd be mostly successful. It's all in the ease-of-use and familiarity, not in the security and command-line speed.

That's one reason why Macs are gaining in popularity again (which previously waned because nobody wrote decent software for them).....and yes I am perfectly aware of OSX's underlying architecture.

BOAC: I've never yet succeeded in getting my laptop (old one or new one) to boot from a hard drive on a USB port. In the end, to preserve XP capability while installing a new drive to run Win 7 Beta, I bought a caddy that goes in the CD/DVD drive slot. That boots just fine! If you have a machine with a suitable slot, that's the way to go. Don't bash your brains out trying to get an external HD to boot: I don't think you'll win.

Aside from the opinions about Linux (I have a separate machine here to try out Linux flavours, but no beard, no pipe, and no red jumper. I do have some black shirts, if that helps)...

Some Linux distros are startlingly competent, and a lot faster on any given hardware than Windows. I note that the three ISPs I use for different purposes all have Linux running their servers. It can't be that bad.

I got on well with it - with most of the popular distros on different partitions on the several hard drives in the test PC. Yes, there was a learning curve, and someone brought up on Windows would need time to learn the differences. But once that's done, they have a free operating system (none of your £179 "upgrade" bills), vast amounts of software available free, and the opportunity to wear beard and sandals if that's their thing. I was close to dropping Windows and becoming a Linux person.

Where Linux and I came apart was when the graphics card in the Linux box popped its clogs. It was a very old AGP card. I replaced it with a different model of card, whereupon all but one of the Linuxes threw hissy fits and refused to start the GUI. It needed a new driver compiling into the kernel (I might have got the words wrong there, and the purists might come after me), and I don't know the relevant series of commands to do the job. Of course, anyone with more than a couple of brain cells would know the correct sequence of ./configure -this +that /the other but I'm a thick linguist and theologian, and pooterspeak isn't my first, second or third language. I gave up.

At that moment, along came Win 7 Beta, faster than XP, without the extreme oddities of Vista. That's more my style.

Thanks for that, Keef. I have 'broken off' the forum to PMs to avoid boring all. I will update if any progress.

I have now managed dr_dos access to the HP hard drive. Anyone got a way to remove Vista SP2 via DOS..............................? I am coming to the conclusion that format/reinstall is the only option if the P Supply/drive are still ok.

If you have a CDROM drive... it's easy to do an "install over".

What might work is to copy the Vista CD to a USB stick and use that to "install over". That's how I got Win 7 RC to install over Win 7 Beta on this machine.

I could send you a Win 7 RC USB stick with the "don't upgrade from earlier versions" disabled, if that's any help - but you'd then have the problem of needing to buy a RTM copy 6 months down the line.

You need to be able to access the "setup.exe" on the USB stick - I don't think you have to be in a GUI, so from DOS might do the job. Not tried it that way, so don't know.

Another thought: if it has a CDROM or a USB slot, a Linux (eg Knoppix) bootable drive may allow you to get in and edit.

GG - excuse the confusion. I see your bootdisk link covers up to XP. I understood that Vista did not 'use' DOS? Which DOS img do I need for a Vista boot CD?.

Keef - I had looked at the USB stick solution - there seem to be more options for making them bootable than for USB drives. I'm stuck with only 2GB on a stick at the moment, and Vista is around 3.2GB. I have tried LInux (Ubunbtu) but it does not boot properly - strange graphics screen then a freeze.

My suggestion was to copy dos to a cd and run it as the stand alone operating system which is what I thought you wanted to do, perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you are trying to do? Not certain how it would deal with a large Hard drive and NTFS files though.

I've got several sticks lying around, with useful stuff on 'em. There's a Linux-on-a-stick one that plugs into the USB socket on my laptop and is a complete operating system, including e-mail and allsorts. It needed some clever stuff to make it bootable, and took probably an hour or so to make. It's got the specific drivers for my IBM T42, so isn't any use to anyone else.

The ultimate "fixer" Linux is Knoppix. I've made and given away many CDs of that. It will boot from CD, then allow you to inspect your Windows drive without writing to it in any way. Several friends have had their key "stuff" rescued by that - copied to my plugin USB hard drive.

Dost want an "installable" Win 7 RC USB? Or a Knoppix CD?

GG - as I said in #53 - I can get into dr-dos via 'NTFS for Dos' but that does not 'see' the CD drive.so I cannot get the Vista repair to run that way. Do you know which of the available Dos's will see NTFS and the CD Drive?

Keef - I think I have a Knoppix CD somewhere - I'll have a rifle thro' me drawers.

DOS usually needs separate CDROM support - that MSCDEX thing that we used to play with in the 1990s.

Probably means it wouldn't find a USB stick either.

Sorry Boac I missed that bit. :( I think I'd better go away and have a complete re-think about where I get a hair shirt from :O

Could always use WinPE or BartPE?

...but my vote is still for blatting the hell out of it and having a Sunday to relax.

(says he, into the second day of an SBS2003 to SBS2008 migration)

If you are using drdos or a true dos equivalent up to and including MSDos V7 (Windows 95/98/ME) you need to have the driver for the cd rom drive loaded in the autoexec.bat file of the boot disk.

To do this you need the autoexec.bat text file in your root directory of your boot disk to contain an entry to load the drive MSCDEX.exe driver - typically you wont need any parameters if it is an ATAPI cdrom drive (Most are nowadays) and of you have ample spare drive letters available - for more complex scenarios the command line switches can be found here (Command-Line Switches for MSCDEX.EXE)

Good stuff, Jof - will do. As MB says, today is a day out:ok: Knoppix located.

JofM5,

For a CD-ROM drive to properly work in MS-DOS, it is required that the CD-ROM drivers be loaded in both the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys.

Below are examples of the format of how the drivers should be loaded in the autoexec.bat and config.sys.

AUTOEXEC.BAT:

LOADHIGH=C: \Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001

CONFIG.SYS:

DEVICEHIGH=C: \CD-ROM\NEC_IDE.SYS /D:MSCD001

Bear in mind that the location and name of the relevant device driver (nnnnn.sys) will vary dependent on your configuration - e.g. it may be on the floppy disk. Also you may not be using high memory, in which case just use Load and Device.

Obviously, you will need the correct .sys driver for you CD drive.

Bootdisk.Com is an excellent resource.

SD