Tip of the day/General Tips etc

[MilesAhead]

Right. When I bought my first image backup program it was True Image and Paragon that were the final 2 choices. On my quad core I have Macrium Reflect because the Paragon doesn't support the "fake raid" on that machine. The Macrium 4.2 has no problem. The Linux boot CD sees the drive and also they give you WinPE in your choice of either 64 or 32 bit versions. I had to play around a bit to get it to load the fake raid driver off the CD in WinPE but I got it eventually. Also made a USB Key restore set.

Oh well, I'm not going to get into any involved operations now. Not good to start anything when I'm this tired. I have to get in my TV viewing quota.

[doctorhardware]

Well I am all done and I got the 500 gig drive with the os installed and now all I have to do is format the the second hd that I installed in the laptop. I will have a total of 1 tb of storage. Waiting for WD to release the 1 tb drives and I will get those for the laptop when they come out.

[MilesAhead]

One thing I'm curious about. I take it you have to make sure the OS restored drive, when installed internally, has the same drive letter as it was backed up from? Otherwise wouldn't the registry entries for programs have all hard references to C:\ this and C:\ that when the apps are on D: or F:?

That's a wicked big drawback in an OS. Anchor around the neck restriction.

[dr_ml422]

Miles when you clone the drive it clones everything. Registry settings, drive letters and all. It actually makes n exact copy of w/e drive you're cloning. So when you decide to plug it in after taking out the original drive 4 w/e reason the mobo recognizes everything as is. Just like the original. Matter of fact not only will it clone your drive it will allocate the correct space and adjust anything that needs to in the cloned drive. Hence you could have a 8mb cache drive in your pc and decide to clone it to a 16 or 32 mb drive w/even more space. Acronis will adjust everything so it will fit the new cloned drive.

This is great because like I said you could have various editions of a os cloned from same mobo and when you plug them in it'll start and open up just like it was always there. I haven't tried 64 os cloned on same mobo where the previous drive had a 32 bit, but I'm almost sure it will take. Only thing that you'll ever need to separately backup is your data like video, music etc... Not wise to keep that on os in my documents etc...

Think about it you'll never have to do a clean install and worry about the whole product key thingy every time you did one. Remember billyBoy only wants 1 key per pc.

[doctorhardware]

Yes the imaged drive will have the same drive ID, I backed up c and the new drive will have the same drive id. The D: drive is the recovery partition on C: drive, D: is the cd rom drive and E: is the second intrenal drive. The hard drive docking station is F:. Or drive 1 is the OS drive, drive 2 is the internal storage drive and the docking station is drive 3. I have had it displayed both ways, so I do not know which way it the correct way.

What can you do that is the way it is, and I think that there is no simple work around for that either.

[MilesAhead]

It sort of makes a fly in the ointment. For example I have dual boot Windows7 XP on my old machine. The W7 evaluation will time out March 2010 so if I wanted to just have a C: with XP on it, I can't unroll the backup image since the Registry thinks everything is on drive H: for XP. The only option would probably be to make a bunch of dummy partitions until I got to H: if the thing will restore to an extended partition and boot from it? Guess I'll worry about it in 2010 sometime.

[MilesAhead]

delay for batch files

Sometimes you want to delay closing a command prompt after running a batch or .cmd command file. If you use Pause, then it will hang until you press a key.

Instead of using some external delay program, if you're on XP or later chances are you have TCP/IP so you can use ping.

To test it, open a command prompt and enter this command:

ping -n 3 127.0.0.1 > nul

(The "127.0.0.1" is the IP address for "this computer" meaning the one the command file is running on.)

The cursor should come back after about 3 seconds. The number after the -n is the number of echos requested, but it's close enough to 1 second to use it for the number of seconds delay.

If you get an error message you probably don't have TCP/IP configured on your system.

To have your .cmd file wait 5 seconds, then close the command prompt, use:

ping -n 5 127.0.0.1 > nul
exit


as the last 2 lines.

It also comes in handy if you want to wait a few seconds to give something a chance to kick in. Like if you map a bunch of network drives using a .cmd file, you can put the delay, then open Explorer to My Computer to make sure it worked.

You can open MyComputer with this line:

start explorer.exe /e,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

The long alphanumeric thingy in the braces after the double colon is the CLSID code for MyComputer.

[doctorhardware]

I have always put the time delay after the ip address. Never knew it would work before the ip address.

[MilesAhead]

I have always put the time delay after the ip address. Never knew it would work before the ip address.

I searched the web to find a delay gimmick. Many use the old Dos choice.com but newer Windows flavors don't even have that file anymore. I stumbled on this and it worked. Also found an AutoIt MsgBox where the OK button on the MsgBox dialog counts down the seconds delay. But this is silent and on most Windows systems. No download needed.

[leian]

Hi, I don't have a tip. I just want to thank everyone for sharing the good news here. I had saved a copy of the tips here for future use.

[salionmelisa]

Hi, I don't have a tip. I just want to thank everyone for sharing the good news here. I had saved a copy of the tips here for future use.

yeah, i'll add this thread to my favorites for further using.

[MilesAhead]

Firefox - How to avoid "Welcome" when switching versions

I like to try out the Firefox betas and even nightly builds. One thing that's really annoying though, is every time I run one version, then switch to another, or run Firefox Sandboxed(using Sandboxie) then with no sandbox.. it wants to bring me to the Welcome or First Run page. After awhile seeing "thanks for trying a beta" gets old.

This works for me. I have in my options to start Firefox showing the home page. As home page I use about:blank to start with just a blank page. It may also work if you use your home page instead of about:blank. Try it and find out.

Anyway, to get rid of the "Welcome" in FF 3.x in the address bar type
about:config

in the search type StartUp

you will see settings with the words Welcome and First Run
and some stuff about Override URL. Double click them.
A dialog pops up. Substitute either about:blank or your home page URL for what is in the dialog. Close Firefox.

Now you should be able to switch between various betas(assuming you share the same profile) and run Sandboxed, no sandbox, back and forth all you want and not get the splash page.

[MilesAhead]

Run Firefox portable out of a ramdisk when your HD is busy

I've found myself in this position a few times. I start a video mux going and then I remember I wanted to check something on the web. Oops!! Now I've got to wait(since I only have 1 internal HD) forever for Firefox to load up.

To remove this frustration I installed Firefox 3.6 portable. Also got a free Ramdisk from Dataram but you can use others.

One place to get Firefox 3.6 Portable

Whichever ramdisk program you use, see its directions for creating a ramdisk and assigning a drive letter. Also you want one that can save the contents of the ramdisk to an image file on your HD.

Once you have a ramdisk large enough to hold your Firefox Portable installation, copy it from HD to the ramdisk with this command:

XCOPY X:\PortableFirefox\*.* B:\firefox\ /E /Y /C

where 'X' is the drive letter where Firefox portable lives.
And 'B' is assumed to be the drive letter assigned the ramdisk.
It doesn't have to be B: .. usually you can use Disk Management
in the Windows administrative tools applet to assign the drive letter.

Now save the ramdisk to your HD image file.
The Dataram doesn't have an option to autostart with Windows, but
it does have a setting to load the image when you start the ramdisk.
I just put a shortcut in the Startup folder to remind me to run the
Dataram Ramdisk configuration. Once set up all I do is push the
Start Ramdisk Button and minimize the program to tray.

If you can't spare 80MB or so for a ramdisk you can also run FF portable off a USB drive.

Now when my HD is busy instead of my regular Firefox 3.6 I just run the portable in the ramdisk. I avoid frequent saves of the disk image by instead saving bookmarks and passwords to my FTP site using the SyncPlaces AddOn.

edit: btw I found out Dataram Ramdisk is much happier about letting you stop the Ramdisk if you don't associate it with an image file on your HD(at least it seems that way to me.) So the trick is to let it make an empty ramdisk, and use the XCopy command to copy your portable firefox into it. When you kill the ramdisk, all the firefox stuff disappears, which kind of kills using NoScript in the ramdisk(settings for each site won't be saved.) To get around that I just run the portable firefox in ram, sandboxed using Sandboxie!!

[dr_ml422]

Miles you have a pretty powerful system w/that quad core no? I encode w/my build and have been able to go online w/IE. Are you using all your cores when this slow startup w/FF happens? Or is this even w/a regular muxing of 1 core? I also only have 1 HDD in my Build. Although I think for future encoding I'm going to use my docking station as the source and output folder through my e-sata port. Less strain on the main drive.

[MilesAhead]

No, it's not so much the CPU is busy, but when I'm doing disk intensive stuff. Plus I have my Superfetch set to only cache boot files. Don't know if that makes a difference. I'd probably put a WD drive in this thing if it wasn't such a nightmare. For some unknown reason in this model they have a cage to hold 2 HDs. There's only one in it. But you can't just open the side of the case and stick a drive in. You have to unsnap the cage, unhook the cable, then you have the cage in hand. You screw in a new drive, hook up the cable, and here's the fun part, you have to press the cage into the case and get it to snap into these 4 snaps you can't see because they are right under the bottom of the cage. Some moron really took some drugs and designed this thing!!



I think what I may do is get a USB 3.0 card and USB 3.0 docking station. Then my WD drives sitting in that should be fast enough to run portable apps.

Setting up this ramdrive thing has been kind of fun though. Reminds me of the type of stuff I used to do with Win98.