Dirty Harry

Now, when I assume you've gotten that far that the only problem you have left is the letter problem... That you can fix by having windoze assign the drive letters again, your boot drive will become C. To do this, use regedit and delete the values (all of 'em) you find under HKLM/system/MountedDevices. Upon reboot you'll find that your (real) boot drive is C, if the others went wrong you can change them with the console "Disk Management". Just found out ! H.

Don't sell it quite that fast. It could be that the dumbasses charge your card again as they ship the stuff. Good luck anyhow and let's hope the revenge is yours! H.

Since beginning of time! Having two hard drives on a master/slave config is pretty much always the LEAST desirable option if you have a controller free. Performance suffers in general, and the slowest device sets the speed for the whole chain. I strongly believe that your problems are caused by the fact that you try to run a master/slave config. In fact, I doubt that you'll ever get it to work with that config. Are you changing the jumper also every time you boot from a different disk? You'd have to do that, and then you mght just as well swap the drives around instead. What the Maxtor guy says sounds good "they have to stay on the same bus the O/S was loaded on" but its not literaly true. Its more than enough if they stay on the same controller, and W2K is just automatically usng the right driver when you swap them around. The classic trick to install W2k the easy way is to do it on the IDE controller, then load the HPT drivers and then move the HD to the HPT controller. You copied the posted ARC paths from somewhere (the file called boot.ini). well, that is a boot menu! The only thing is that as the timeout value is 0 you propably never get to see it. H.

Quote: But its the price that turns me off See, thats where the Athlons come in ! And they're faster. H.

Can't understand it, it doesn't happen here when I clone with Drive Image. I've done this for years on several MoBo's both with the drives on the standard IDE controllers, and on the HPT controller. What you are saying is that the cloned drive first boots OK as C as long as it's alone, but the moment you plug in the original drive the cloned one realizes that it's second priority even if you don't change a thing. I'm tempted to say that is impossible. What do you mean "I hooked the drives up to IDE1". The drives MUST be on different cables !!! Could it be that in your bios settings the first boot device is the original (a, c, scsi) and you have only changed the setting for the second boot device ? If number one doesn't exist it will boot from the second one, but the moment nr one comes back it will boot there again. You have both drives on the HPT controller and you are changing the boot drive in the HPT setup screen (not in the system bios), aren't you ? You have no boot menu (i.e the original is not a dual boot config)? What happens if you put the original on HPT and the clone on IDE 1. Again, boot up the clone alone first (as C) then plug in the original without changing anything in Bios/HPT setup. What happens if you clone the drive, and switch the cables around ? Does the orig become D? H.

If you boot with the single cloned drive, power down, connect the orig drive and then boot from the cloned drive again, what happens? Does it stay C, or does it switch itself to D ? In my opinion you were wise to stay with FAT, thats my choice too. As you can see in another thread a day or two ago, this is not a popular opinion around here, so sschh... H.

Ooh, I see... One possible reason could be the feared profile corruption. Can you switch off the TweakUI autologin in safe mode ? (sorry, not at a W2k box now so I can't test it). There is a chance that the logged boot would still tell you something useful, so I'd still go thru that exercise. Installed anything recently ? Other than that, I don't have many ideas. Wait a while and see if someone else has a useful tip, then I guess your options are to boot from CD and try to repair the install, or find yourself SOL (Sh1t outta luck) and face a reinstall. H.

Blue Screen Of Death, common slang for what you so precisely called the blue screen. Sorry, I should have been clearer. H.

What does the BSOD say ? Boot to the BSOD with the option "logged", then boot into safe mode and check the fresh log file to see if it gives you a clue as to what is causing the problem. Once you are in safe mode, you might as well take out all startup programs, and set tweakUI back to manual log in. H

Quote: I disconnected the first drive since there is no way to disable it in the bios, As explained in another thread I believe you can disable a drive by setting the properties manually in bios. Switch of the autodetect, and manually use the highest CYL setting (65535 or something similar)which means none. I don't recall the HPT settings screen (and can't check it right now) but it is very possible that this only works on the standard IDE contraoller. Let us know if this works /doesn't work if you try. Quote: Originally posted by videobruce Another observation is the 2nd drive is ID'ed as 'D' not 'C' ...When the 2 drives are both on line the 2nd drive is using the pagefile from the first drive. This is logical, because the enviroment variable on the cloned drive is pointing to C:, but it beats me why the drive letter doesn't change to C if you only have one drive connected. I've done what you are describing on a very frequent basis but using Drive Image, and the boot drive always switches itself to C: Are you using NTFS or FAT. For my part I'stayed with FAT32 H.

Defragging the page file can be done by other means also. Just boot to DOS (diskette or dual boot) and delete the damned thing. It recreates itself as a consequtive file when you boot back to W2K/XP. With NTFS I'd suggest you just move it to another partition and back, with the same effect. H.

Right, Arctic Silver is the paste to use, as mentioned in my first post. Equally important is to apply it exactly according to instructions, see their web site for details. Oddly enough, you can't really apply too little of the stuff. BTW, Athlons are supposed to run well at 70 C and higher (see their homepage for specs), but its propably best not to stretch your luck too much. The Northbridge chip will get equally hot or hotter, so if you are serious about OCing, take off that fan, lap it and apply Arctic. H.

My advice is to the contrary. Do not use autsense on your NIC's, you don't really need them talking to each other all the time to see if they've gotten any faster. Set them to the fastest speed they both support, in most cases 100mbit, in your case 10mbit. Why you wouldn't like to use full duplex if you can is beyond me, at least if you want your LAN to be fast. Of course, if the old 10 mbit doesn't support full duplex thats a reason not to use it. Equally, forget about netbeui, that is a protocol from days long before W2k/XP. In fact, XP doesn't even install it by default, and thats propably for a good reason. With contradictory advice like this, try both, by all means. H.

If you have two devices on the same IDE channel (=cable), the slower one will determine the speed. Thus, you should not put HD:s of different generation (like a ata33 and ata66) on the same channel. At least with Drive Image, it doesn't matter for the cloning process how you have your drives setup. And its really a few mouse clicks to do the whole thing. H.

You can't do it under Windows, some files are in use and will not copy if we are talking about the system partition. On any other partition it should work well. With Drive Image I've done this many times, no problem at all, and I assume Ghost would work just as well even if we're talking about the system partition. Just watch out, the 5.0 of Drive Image hides either partition. It could be that there are some free/shareware utilities for this also, I vaguely recall seeing some. H.

Always looking for new thrills and the IE is getting to feel a bit too old and familiar. No punks to shoot at either so ask yourself a question: What are the best softwares you're using to give Internet Explorer a totally new feel or functionality? What have you done do to get your "browsing experiance" greater ?? What makes you feel lucky when you open your all changed Explorer ? Well, what do you? H.

Sure, -chkdsk -over 32 GB partitions -over 4 GB files -(nobody mentioned, but lots of files) these are valid arguments. But, of these three only getting rid of the chkdsk 8 sec annoyance is really what I would ever encounter at home. So I still feel very safe having the option to boot into dos, using dos tools n a dark day, and keep NTFS for those over 32 GB partitions which is a (not all that good) reason. Only have one of 'em, anyhow. And security - Well, thats Mr. Smith, Mr. Wesson and me. H.

From your post its hard to say. What is your CPU temp now? It all depends on case cooling, CPU contact etc. What case cooling do you have ? Generally I see no reason why a good heatsink, with Arctic Silver in between wouldn't work with a 5200 rpm fan. Put the 7000 rpm in, if the sys is stable case closed after a though hour, switch the fan and see what happens. You should try to get a case temp no more than 3-5 C higher than ambient and keep your CPU under full load beneath 60 C. You can go higher, but you should really choose the noise when your CPU is approaching those values. Ideally, you should run the CPU at a max of perhaps 50-55 C.

Hmm, maybe I would slowly become a believer with hard facts, and who knows, maybe I'll try an all- NTFS system one day (BTW I do currently have a partition at NTFS). And true, I do have **extremely** small harddrives, one is a mere 80 Gig, the other a pity at 45 GB on my main sys. Maybe I should put in a few more drives from my other machines, so I could match the 244 GB and see the light. Beeing that I avoided ME because I didn't subscribe to the "Newer is Better" - "Bill is God" theory I don't quite see the point of the argument that NTFS is specifically designed for NT, which by the way is a bit old by know. Specifically designed are also the defrag utility of NT/XP and the CD-burning util of XP, are they also so great that you are on crack if you replace them with something else? Still, this thread remains kinda short of real arguments, suspicions on my crack smoking and such doesn't explain quite what practical magic I'll get from leaving FAT. Oh, yes, I could put in the recovery console, great, one more thing to install to do exactly what theat floppy or dual boot does. Good ol' Brian puts forward a good argument though, not have to see the chkdsk b-s is something I'd enjoy. Who knows, more real arguments could turn me around, but crack smoking - no. H.

I'd do what htsource suggest but use Powerquest Drive Image H.

Quote: The argument about being able to boot with a floppy is a little moot ...the OS's are just too damn stable to need that ability. Just look around here at NTcomp, quite often threads with locked files and similar probs pop up - all easily solved with a little floppy. Quote: Secondly, security. Sure, NTFS is securer choice as a OS. But it so happens that I keep all the really secret files at work. BTW, a retina scanning device is not on my shopping list either. Again, my argument is only that FAT can save you some headaches and NTFS doesn't offer me something I need on a home LAN. H.

Admitted, using extremely large files is the one (only ...) reason to go NTFS even on a home PC, for those of us who do video editing or have databases that size on their HD. I don't, but if I needed this I'd still keep at least the system partition as a FAT one. And OK, at the point when you have 500 GB storage it would be annoying to have to do 16 partitions of 32 GB each I am not trying to say that FAT is better, its just that the features of NTFS are largely irrelevant in a small enviroment. For my part I'd hate to loose the access to a hardrive after a boot off a floppy, its like a lifeboat to have DOS available when things go wrong. Just in case. H.

Yes, IMO, NTFS is just a unnecessary source of trouble for the average home / small LAN user. If we are talking big networks (say corporate or campus) the situation is different. Be assured there will be dozens of prople that will reply to this and say that NTFS is so great because it is so secure etc, blah blah blah. But ask yourself the question: are these features really useful for me ? Or would you rather have the ability to boot from a floppy and tinker with your harddrive in case of problems? H.

If its of any comfort to you, my 80 GB IBM 120 GXP drive only shows up with 78529 MB. Alien gave the explanation. Sampson I don't quite follow your point when you wrote: "Your 80 Gig hard drive probably has more than 80 Gig. Generally, there are scads of sectors that don't appear that are used for storing defects." Are you saying that there are spare sectors ? Otherwise who cares about space that you can't see or access ? What goes to copying files to floppies and seeing a different size - I thought it was because of different cluster sizes. H.

Quote: Ibut I saw the Backstreet Boys in concert. ... Ok go ahead, make fun This is not fun, it is tragical. So sorry for you / I promise not to tell your old Ma. H.