gHacks technology news » bootdisk http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:56:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Windows Boot Manager http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/20/windows-boot-manager/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/20/windows-boot-manager/#comments Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:38:49 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7130 Many users shy away from installing multiple operating systems on their computer because of problems that can arise in the boot sector. Some operating systems like to replace the existing boot information with their own which would mean that the user would have to find a way to replace or add those boot information again so that all operating systems would show up when booting the computer.

Windows boot manager Boot-US is a universal boot manager that can boot many operating systems properly including all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 to Windows Server 2008, MS-Dos, Linux, Free BSD, VMWare and several exotic operating systems like Oberon, Novel-DOS or QNX Realtime Plattform.

The boot manager itself can be installed in the MBR (Master Boot Record), the primary partition or on disk. The latter being an excellent way of testing the boot manager before installing it on the hard drive.

Other interesting functions of the Windows boot manager are (Windows because it is a Windows application):

  • Support for hard disks up to 2048 GB (2 TB)
  • Allows booting beyond the 8 GB limit
  • Partitions can be created, deleted, activated and hid
  • Password protection for boot manager and configuration program
  • Command-line and GUI version
  • True hiding of partitions

During program start the Windows boot manager is displaying the discovered partitions and the existing operating systems. It is important to make sure that the information that are displayed are correct before installing the boot manager. The user should also consider making backups of the list of partitions and boot sectors to be able to revert back if the installation of the boot manager goes wrong in any way. Those are just precautionary measures.

After that the user should install the boot manager to a floppy disk first if one is installed on the computer system. Most modern computers come without a floppy disk drive. Those users can check out the Copy and run Floppy Boot Disks from USB to add the boot manager to an USB device and boot the computer system from that device to be able to test the boot manager. Make sure to select Do not change partitions IDs in step four of the boot manager creation.

When the test is going through without errors the boot manager can be installed on the primary partition or Master Boot Record. The software developers recommend to install the boot manager in the primary partition if possible.

The Windows Boot Manager Boot-US was tested on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 test system without difficulties.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/20/windows-boot-manager/feed/ 8 Analyze and Repair PC Hardware http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/25/analyze-and-repair-pc-hardware/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/25/analyze-and-repair-pc-hardware/#comments Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:41:17 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/25/analyze-and-repair-pc-hardware/ I’m the family’s computer guy and it is slowly spreading to family friends and even neighbors as well thanks to recommendations of family members. Recently my mum told my grandmother’s neighbors that I could take a look at their computer which was showing a bluescreen during startup and well, it’s hard to say no to your mother so I took the computer to analyze the problem that was leading to the bluescreen message.

It was an old computer, an AMD Duron 800 Mhz with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, 256 Megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The first thing I did was to lookup the Stop error message that was showing when the bluescreen appeared only to find out that it was most likely a hardware related problem.

My guess was that it was either the motherboard, the RAM or the hard drive that were leading to the bluescreen so I had to test them to find the cause for it. Oh, before I started I made sure that every piece of hardware that was not needed to run the computer was disconnected, like sound and network adapters but also secondary drives and onboard components.

The only way to do this was to burn a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD which contains tools to analyze the hardware and boot it. The disc contains all kinds of utilities to scan, analyze and repair hardware connected to a computer and it is especially effective when it comes to RAM and hard drives.

I decided to run Memtest to test the RAM of the computer which turned out to be fine. The next tool was the Drive Fitness Test designed for IBM and Hitachi hard drives. It turned out that the hard drive had damaged sectors which the tool was able to repair.

With the errors corrected I tried to boot into Windows again and it happened to load just fine. If that would not have helped I would have tried some additional tools to test the CPU for instance. I would have used the cloning tool to clone the hard drive and format it completely to start the installation a new.

The Ultimate Boot CD is an excellent utility if you want to test major PC components without having to install software on the computer.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/25/analyze-and-repair-pc-hardware/feed/ 3 Copy and run Floppy Boot Disks from USB http://www.ghacks.net/2006/09/06/copy-and-run-floppy-boot-disks-from-usb/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/09/06/copy-and-run-floppy-boot-disks-from-usb/#comments Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:30:56 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/09/06/copy-and-run-floppy-boot-disks-from-usb/ Ghacks got slashdotted yesterday and I had to enable caching to make the site run fluent as usual. I’m sorry if you experienced troubles connecting to my website, those should be solved by now. When I was installing Windows XP on my new computer that had only SATA drives I had to use a floppy disk to load the SATA drivers because Windows did not have them onboard at that time. I had to buy a floppy drive, floppy disks and create a bootdisk and load the drivers from that disk during setup.

I’am now going to introduce two freewares that emulate floppy drives and are able to copy and run the bootdisk from USB. The first freeware is called Bootdisk to Bootstick, it makes it possible to copy the contents of a floppy disk or virtual floppy image to an USB stick. The USB stick remains bootable just like the floppy disk would be. This is great if you do not have a floppy drive anymore but need to boot from floppy because your manufacturer is offering the tool / driver only as a bootable floppy disk.

Virtual Floppy drive is used to emulate a floppy drive making it possible to create bootable floppy disks without having a floppy drive connected to your computer. I still remember the old days when a program would only create a bootdisk if a floppy drive was present. If you did not have a floppy drive or disk inside it would not create the much needed bootdisk. This belongs to the past now.

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