VMware Workstation 7 in Windows 7: Error Moving File or Folder

I had just started using Windows XP SP3 as a guest in VMware Workstation 7.1 on a Windows 7 host.  It seemed that I was getting a certain error every time I tried to move files from one folder to another.  Both the target and source drives were on network drives, in the VMware sense:  they were local drives on that computer, but they were not part of the actual virtual machine (VM) as drive C was, so Workstation considered them network drives.  When I attempted to paste these files into a folder on that other drive, I got this error message:

Error Moving File or Folder

Cannot move [filename]: It is being used by another person or program.

Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.

These files were not in use anywhere, as far as I could tell.  I was using a utility called Unlocker.  When this kind of error would occur, Unlocker would pop up, provide relevant information, and offer to help.  In this case, Unlocker's message was, "No locking handle found."  This was not absolutely the last word on the subject, but I had found Unlocker to be pretty reliable.

This was happening every time I tried to move files.  It was not a problem with one particular troublesome file.  It happened with moving files, not with deleting them.  I was able to delete files, and copy files; I just couldn't move files.  I had done a global change of file properties so that none were read-only.  This inability to move files occurred on all network drives.

I did a search on this error.  Very few results turned up.  I posted a question on it in a VMware forum.  One of the results from the search led to a lot of instances where people were getting the same or a similar error message in non-VM contexts.  Some of the advice offered in those kinds of situations involved one-off solutions, where there was a particularly troublesome file.  Someone suggested trying to do this as administrator, but I was already running as administrator.

That last person remarked that the errors s/he was experiencing may have resulted from changing the host name on the computer.  This was not a newly created VM.  I had used it in Workstation for Linux, to run WinXP on an Ubuntu host on a separate computer.  When I brought it over to this computer and fired it up, Workstation asked whether I had copied or moved it.  I said I moved it.  So possibly what was happening was that Workstation remained confused about some aspect of the machine due to the fact that it was not a virgin WinXP creation.

To explore this possibility, I closed down this VM and started up another.  I didn't want to spend the time to create a whole new WinXP installation in a VM.  What I did instead was to choose a preexisting VM that had different origins.  So now I felt that I should clarify the genealogy of this thing.  This troublesome VM was not actually created in Workstation.  It was created by VMware Converter.  I had used Converter to convert a native WinXP installation into a VM that I then used in Workstation for Linux.

I did have another WinXP VM that I had created in Workstation for Linux -- installing Windows XP from scratch inside a virtual machine, that is, rather than installing it on a regular computer and then converting it.  So that was the one I tried using now.  The problem did not occur there.  These differences in origins may have explained the difference in behavior.  It may also have had something to do with the differences in size.  The converted native machine was twice the size of the born-in-virtual machine.  Its size itself may have been an issue, or there may have been a problem with some program that I had installed within that larger machine.

Portable Applications in Windows XP: Which Ones to Use

I was assembling a list of preferred Windows XP applications.  Part of my goal was to replace installed apps with portable apps where possible.  Doing so had the advantages of getting back up and running much more quickly, whenever I would have to reinstall Windows; reducing system problems due to misbehaving applications; and having my favorite tools available, in my preferred configuration, when I had to use someone else's computer.  With the emergence of cloud computing, among other things, there had been a trend toward the virtualization of applications -- toward, that is, making apps less dependent upon a single piece of hardware.
So now I was engaged in a search for applications that would replace some of those I had traditionally installed on my Windows XP systems.  In my search, I found there were many sources of portable apps, including the categorized and somewhat ranked set in Andrew Lee's Portable Freeware Collection.  I used these sources to supplement and revise the set that I had started with, from PortableApps.com.  It seemed likely that I would continue to add preferred portable apps from various sources indefinitely.  In that sense, this post can only be a step along the way.  Even so, by this time I had accumulated enough applications to say a few things on the subject.

Microsoft Office and Alternatives 

Perhaps the single most important thing to say was that there were substitutes for Microsoft Office.  This was important because it permitted some freedom from dependence upon Microsoft programs.  I had already achieved some such freedom by switching to Ubuntu as my operating system and by running Windows XP within VMware virtual machines (VMs) on Ubuntu/WinXP dual-boot machines.  Through that step, I had multiple alternatives, whenever Microsoft Windows and/or Office failed me:  I could run Microsoft Office, or the freeware OpenOffice alternative, on either Windows or Ubuntu, either natively or virtually.  After that, there were very few times when I was substantially unable to get work done because of some software failure arising from Microsoft software.

The next step in that regard was to move away from treating either Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office as my primary operating or office system.  Where Windows was concerned, I had recently concluded that the computing world, and I, had not yet come up with a superior end-user alternative for PC-based (as distinct from e.g., Apple) systems.  There were far more, and far more useful, software applications available on Windows than on Ubuntu or other varieties of Linux.  But in the case of Office, it did increasingly appear that there were superior alternatives -- notably OpenOffice.  Then, too, I was among those keyboard-oriented users who were put off by the mouse-oriented ribbon that debuted in Office 2007.  In any event, I had had too many experiences with malfunctioning computer installations that desperately needed to be reinstalled, but that I was currently unable to reinstall because it would take too many hours to install and adjust Office and other heavyweight programs.

The current search for portable apps pushed me further in the direction of seeking an alternative to Microsoft Office.  As described in a separate post, people were struggling with the non-portability of Office 2003 and 2007.  Some pursued the option of downloading a presumably bootleg copy of Microsoft Office that was somehow converted into portable format.  That option (as noted in that other post) entailed considerable risk of viral infection, instability, and inflexibility.  Another option, which I did pursue, was to create my own portable version from my own copy of Office.  That, too, did not turn out well, primarily because the software capable of doing it properly was still too expensive.  Since I considered portability a real benefit, I was thus even more motivated to take seriously the OpenOffice alternative, which was freely available in Windows-based portable form.

Other Top Portable Apps 

Of course, there is more to the world than office productivity software.  A complete set of portable apps must depend on the needs of the individual user.  But it may be possible to select some, from among the estimated 150 categories displayed in the Portable Freeware Collection, from which a typical user might want to draw at least one portable app.

In preparing this list, I excluded many categories that did not interest me and/or in which I was not knowledgeable.  Among these excluded categories (to name a few) were those having to do with iPods, mp3 tags, games, and IM.  Also, in some instances, I took more than one example from a category (especially from categories with grab-bag names like "miscellaneous"), or took something other than the top-ranked program.  I have also used my own category headings, rather those supplied by the PFC website.  In short, this list is offered for purposes of interest, not precision.

Audio and Video

XMedia Recode
Audacity
IrfanView
Duplicate Music Files Finder
VirtualDub Portable
VLC
XBlender

Images, Graphics, Scanning

Photoscape
Dia
Softi FreeOCR

CD/DVD

ImgBurn
Virtual CDRom Control Panel
WinToFlash
Folder2Iso
BonkEnc

Files and Folders

Multi File Tool
7-Zip
TreeSize
Duplicate File Finder
ICE ECC
FreeCommander
FileCommander 
Undelete Plus
Bulk Rename Utility
Index Your Files
Unlocker

Backup and Synchronization

Toucan
FastCopy
ozSync

Downloading, FTP

Free Download Manager
FileZilla
WinHTTrack
uTorrent
VDownloader

Security & Privacy

PortableTor
Blowfish Advanced CS
ClamWin Portable
KeePass
CCleaner
Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder

Web Browsers

Firefox
Opera
FireTune
Opera Settings Import & Export Tool

PDF

Scan2PDF
Foxit Reader
Swift PDF

Registry Editing

Registry Commander
Regshot
RegFromApp
RegScanner

Remote Collaboration

ShowMyPC
TeamViewer

Bookmarks

TrayURL
AM-DeadLink

Fun & Entertainment

Raindrop
Sumotori Dreams
Wallpaper Randomizer

System Information

SIW 
PC Wizard 
Autoruns

Calendar & Time

Sunbird
TimeSync

General Reference

Convert
WeatherMate

HTML & Text Editing

KompoZer
HTML Portable Editor
Notepad++

Onscreen

ClipX
PNotes
SysExporter
Virtual Magnifying Glass

Phone & Email

Thunderbird
Skype

Math & Statistics

SpeedCrunch
R

Productivity & Desktop Layout

OpenOffice
WinTabber
VirtuaWin

Other

RamBooster
Stalled Printer Repair
EjectUSB
JkDefrag
AutoIt
Don't Sleep
PStart
Scribus
DSpeech

Transitioning Away from Windows Toward Ubuntu: The Next Step

In September 2008, I reached a point of relative stasis in the development of my computer setup.  I was using two computers, each with its own monitor, but with a common mouse and keyboard via KVM switch.  Both computers were dual-boot setups, so that I could have gone into Windows or Ubuntu on either one; but I tended to just use one or the other.  Specifically, on one computer, I installed Ubuntu and then used VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in virtual machines (VMs).  On the other computer, I was almost always running Windows XP, rarely going into Ubuntu.

I had assumed, there at the end of summer 2008, that I would be revisiting this layout in summer 2009.  Generally, that didn't happen.  Instead, two years passed.  At this point in 2010, however, I found that there had been some developments, such that this system could evolve.

One development was that, sometime in the intervening two years, I set up a third desktop computer.  It was mostly a collection of hand-me-down parts, but it ran Windows XP well enough.  If I really needed to do something in XP, I probably could do it there.  Moreover, I had acquired a laptop, for a bargain price of around $350 -- plus another $250 or so that I didn't entirely expect to spend, when I went to the store, for an extended warranty, laptop sleeve, screen protector, wireless mouse, etc.  Such a deal!  Anyway, neither the laptop nor the bucket-shop computer were anything to write home about, but they would serve in a pinch.

Another development was that I had run into several systems problems on the primary Windows XP machine.  It still ran stably, but I was getting occasional flaky problems.  Probably there would have been a list of them, if I had taken a minute to list the ways in which the machine was not performing up to snuff.

Probably the most worrisome such problem was that I had reached a dead-end in my efforts to install Windows updates on that primary machine.  It just wouldn't install them.  I had revisited the problem repeatedly.  At this point, it would probably have been more effective to just reinstall WinXP from scratch on that machine.

That update situation had been persisting for a while.  It hadn't bothered me much.  Recently, though, something else had happened.  I had somehow started using McAfee antivirus software, and I had just discovered that McAfee had been piling up gigabytes of stuff in .bup files.  I was concerned that this feat would have been possible only by mixing in data files; therefore, I had begun an effort to compare against an old backup and figure out what, if anything, might have gone missing over the past several months or longer.  So that was the end of McAfee, for me, but it was also a wake-up call to take computer security more seriously.  That meant keeping updates installed, but perhaps it also meant it was time to continue my migration away from Windows.

For such reasons, I thought it might be time to consider running both of my primary computers under the same kind of Ubuntu - VMware - WinXP VM setup.  If I needed XP, I could still drop back into the dual-boot, or just use that hand-me-down computer.  If I needed Vista or Windows 7, I could use the laptop, which was presently running the one but which apparently qualified for a free upgrade to the other.

In addition to those developments on the Windows side, things had also been happening on the Ubuntu side of the equation.  First, the good things.  Ubuntu was looking good and running well.  I had learned a bit more about Wine.  Generally, I was continuing to become more familiar and comfortable with the world beyond Windows.  I still had occasional issues with VMware, but generally nothing lethal.  As an additional consideration, Oracle had created the impression that it might be positioning VirtualBox to compete effectively with VMware.  Even without that, it was still nice that I could leave a WinXP VM running in Ubuntu for a week without needing to reboot it, while that would just never work on the native WinXP machine.

At the same time, after these several years of experimenting with Ubuntu, I had to agree with someone who had said that Linux distributions still tended to be terribly unpolished in comparison with Windows.  Somewhat contrary to my expectations, I was not finding many instances in which Ubuntu programs were delivering superior functionality and reliability.  For instance, I had bought a copy of Beyond Compare, a file synchronization program.  (I subsequently realized that I probably could have gotten by with a freeware alternative, but whatever.)  There were Windows and Linux versions of Beyond Compare.  The Linux version did not seem to be very actively developed, and it was having problems that I wasn't having in the Windows version.  The same was true elsewhere.  I was still using IrfanView, which did not yet have a Linux version; I was still using CoolEdit 2000, because it had features that Audacity did not provide.  Generally, I was finding that Ubuntu was great as an operating system; I was finding it useful as an underlying layer, to handle tasks that WinXP couldn't handle (e.g., delete files that WinXP couldn't delete); I found that WinXP running in a VM on Ubuntu was more stable (although slower) than a native WinXP installation.  But at the point of application, for my purposes, Ubuntu wasn't a serious competitor against Windows XP.  And I was increasingly unwilling to invest the time to learn how to do everything in two or more different ways.

My conclusion, at this point, was that the best of both worlds called for running Windows XP within virtual machines (in VMware or otherwise) on an Ubuntu operating system base, on an Ubuntu/XP dual-boot computer.  I had already worked through many of the issues in this sort of setup, and could therefore hope to be efficient and preserve multiple troubleshooting options without too much of a time investment.  If Windows 7, Ubuntu, or some other operating system (OS) began to display capabilities that I badly needed, I would hopefully be able to incorporate those OSs into my setup, one computer at a time, without too much disruption overall.

Windows XP: Some Updates Were Not Installed

I had experienced occasional problems when trying to install updates to Windows XP SP3.  At some point, those problems stopped being resolved and started accumulating.  At the time of writing this post, I faced a situation in which the Microsoft Update webpage told me that I had 47 "High Priority" updates to install, along with seven optional hardware and software updates; and yet, each time I tried to install those updates, I got the messages "Some updates were not installed" and "The following updates were not installed."  I was concerned that these updates might be important for system security and stability.

On this particular day, I had once again sought out advice.  The summary of the steps I took, all of which failed, is as follows:

*   *   *   *   *

*** FIRST TRY ***


6. Make a folder "C:\WUAGENT" (any location/name can be used). Download into it:
   - http://download.windowsupdate.com/v7/windowsupdate/redist/standalone/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe
   - better yet, read "http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949104" and get the proper file there.
7. Start -> Run "C:\WUAGENT\WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe /wuforce".
   - note: this failed for me if the "Automatic Updates" service was stopped.
   - I (RW) had to run it twice to get it to work.
8. In IE run "Tools -> Windows Updates" - perhaps a few times as it rebuilds update stuff.

*** SECOND TRY ***

First, do this:

1. Start -> Run "services.msc" (in Vista, it's Start->All Programs->Accessories->Run)
2. Right "Automatic Updates" and select "stop".
3. Start -> Run "%systemroot%"
4. Delete "SoftwareDistribution" folder and "WindowsUpdate.log"
5. Back in services, right-click "Automatic Updates" and select "start".

Then run steps 6-8, above.

*** THIRD TRY ***

Start > Run > regsvr32 wups2.dll
Then try running Windows Updates.

*** FOURTH TRY ***

REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL
REGSVR32 ATL.DLL
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL

*** FIFTH TRY ***

net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
net start wuauserv

*** SIXTH TRY ***

Look at the log file for one of the updates.  Example:
Security Update for Windows XP (KB979309)

Then put that number into the following command:

%windir%\KB979309.log

In my case, the end of this log file gave me this information:
1,297: [PatchFilesFromResponseBlob] returning STATUS_READY_TO_INSTALL
1,313: KB979309 installation did not complete.
1,313: Update.exe extended error code = 0xf201

For guidance on whether the update was installed or not, see:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910339/. 

Following the advice on that webpage, look up that error code.  See:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906602/.

That didn't work for me, possibly because I had already obliterated the evidence in previous steps.

Installing a Brother MFC-7340 Printer in Ubuntu 10.04

I was installing Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on a desktop computer.  I wanted to get my Brother MFC-7340 printer working from within Ubuntu.  I had not been able to make it work with Ubuntu 9.10, but now I had found a post where mdgrech described how it could be done.  The steps I took were as follows:

sudo -i

aa-complain cupsd

mkdir /usr/share/cups/model

mkdir /var/spool/lpd

apt-get install sane-utils

apt-get install psutils

It puzzled me that mdgrech’s link led to the LPR driver for the MFC-7420.  I suspected he knew exactly what he was doing; but just in case that was a mistaken link, I went to the Brother Linux driver download page and downloaded the Debian LPR driver for the MFC-7340 instead.  This gave me a file called brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb.  To install the LPR driver, Brother advised using CUPS if it was working on my system.  I wasn’t sure if it was.  I was advised to try this:  “sudo /etc./init.d/cups status.”  That said “cupsd is running.”  Now what?  I followed the links to the Cupswrapper Driver Install page.  There, I had to follow certain “pre-required procedures.”  These appeared to be more or less the steps that mdgrech had already had me take (above).  So apparently he had used the CUPS approach too.  Encouraged, I continued along this CUPS route.  There was some disagreement on the next step.  Brother said that I should turn on the printer and connect it to the computer now; mdgrech seemed to say I should install the driver first.  I wound up not connecting the printer until later.  Meanwhile, it seemed that I would need to be installing the cupswrapper driver as well as the LPR driver, so I went back to the download page and did that.  This gave me a download called cupswrapperMFC7340-2.0.2-1.i386.deb.  The next steps were to navigate to the folder where I had downloaded brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb and then type these commands:

dpkg -i --force-all brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb

dpkg -i --force-all cupswrapperMFC7340-2.0.2-1.i386.deb

dpkg -l | grep Brother

The next step was to go to http://localhost:631/printers.  It showed the printer.  So now I did turn on the printer and plug in the USB cable.  (Note that there are slightly different instructions if your connection is ethernet.)  Ubuntu saw the printer, but gave me a “Missing printer driver” note in the upper right corner of the screen, and then said “Searching for available drivers.”  Eventually it gave me a New Printer dialog.  

Note:  mdgrech had advised, instead, to go to http://localhost:631/admin, select Add printer, choose Brother MFC-7340, choose “Another Make/Manufacturer,” select the MFC-7340, and click Add Printer.  Since I had gone to http://localhost:631/printers as Brother advised, I was now at the New Printer dialog, so I proceeded from there.  I selected “Select printer from database” (with Brother highlighted) > Forward > MFC7340 for CUPS > Brother MFC7340 for CUPS [en] (recommended) > Forward.  I went with the defaults in the “Describe Printer” dialog > Apply.  I printed a test page.  It worked!

There was one other thing I needed to check.  On this Ubuntu machine, I was running Windows XP in a virtual machine in VMware, and had previously tried to install the MFC-7340 from there.  I still had it listed as a printer.  So I went into VMware at this point and tried printing from there.  The print job queued up, but it didn’t print.  I ran Brother’s Installation Diagnostics software, there in Windows XP, and it reported failure:  “Cannot communicate with the machine.”  I went into Start > Settings > Printers and Faxes (right-click) > right-click on the Brother MFC-7340 Printer > Properties > Ports tab.  I checked the box next to the USB003 port, which was the only port that specifically referred to the Brother MFC-7340.  I clicked OK and tried printing again.  Once again, it queued but did not print.  Then it occurred to me that, of course, I would have to go into VMware’s VM > Removable Devices.  There, sure enough, I saw “Brother Printer.”  I clicked Connect.  The queue dialog said, “Printing,” and then it did print.

The other thing I really wanted to be able to do with the Brother MFC-7340 was to scan.  This appeared to be an entirely different process, so I started another post for that.  Otherwise, with this step finished, I returned to the project of tweaking Ubuntu 10.04, as described in a separate post.

Using a Bootable USB Drive to Install Windows XP on an Uncooperative Laptop

As described in another post, I was trying to install WinXP on a Compaq Presario CQ60-420US laptop that would not boot from a Windows XP installation CD.  This post describes the steps I took to try to install from a USB flash drive instead.

I looked for guides on how to create a bootable USB drive using WinXP SP3.  One webpage suggested that I could use UBCD for Windows (UBCD4Win).  I had already installed UBCD4Win on the computer I was using for this investigation, so I thought this approach might make the process faster.  Following the steps on that webpage, I created a supposedly bootable USB drive, using a cheap 2GB USB thumb drive I had gotten from somewhere.  (It sounded like I had better use at least a 1GB drive.)  The webpage said it could take as long as a half-hour on a really cheap (i.e., slow) USB drive.  I plugged this USB drive into the laptop and pressed Esc during the initial boot screen to open the Startup Menu, and then F9 to bring up Boot Device Options.  It gave me only two options:  the DVD drive and the hard drive.  I exited out of that, and the system tried to Start Windows Normally and then crashed and rebooted.  I powered down, powered up, and tried again.  Same thing.  No joy.  It wasn't working.

I started over, this time creating the bootable USB drive using an OCZ Diesel 4GB USB flash drive (using FAT32 rather than FAT16 as instructed).  It still wasn't a terribly fast process.  When I stuck this one in the laptop and rebooted it and hit Esc and then F9, like before, I got a very different Boot Option Menu.  This time, we had two new entries:  DIESEL and LEGACY PCI DEVICE.  I tried DIESEL.  The screen was completely black except for a white cursor that just sat there and blinked.  (Later, I realized that it would always take a while, and that I should just be patient.  I'm not sure whether that would have solved the problem here.)

I let it go for a few minutes and then restarted the machine and tried the Legacy PCI Device option.  This seemed to be designed for booting via a network connection, from a source at the other end of an ethernet cable.  I didn't have any idea of how to do that.  It appeared that the bootable USB drive process had gone correctly, but that whatever was preventing the system from booting from the WinXP CD was also preventing it from booting from the USB.  To test that, I put the Diesel drive in another computer, which I'll call the "test" computer, and set its BIOS to boot first from the USB-FDD option, second from the USB-ZIP option, and third from the USB-CDROM option.  This gave me "Remove disks or other media.  Press any key to restart."  I did that.  On reboot, it went into GRUB.  (I had this machine set for dual-booting into Ubuntu Linux.)  I went back into the BIOS and changed the first entry to be USB-HDD.  This was my last remaining USB option.  I plugged the Diesel back in.  Once again, "Remove disks or other media."  The Diesel USB drive had given me somewhat more clarity, but it was still not working.  I had tried creating a bootable USB drive once before.  I think that one was for Ubuntu, but it had used the same BartPE components that went into this one.  It hadn't worked either -- not only for me, as I recall, but for a number of other people.

I decided to try another way of making a bootable USB drive, not involving USBCD4Win.  This time, the webpage I followed began with installing BartPE to a folder with a name like C:\pebuilder.  I had already done that, in the process of setting up UBCD4Win.  Next, they had me download and install UltraISO Premium (free to try).  It didn't look like my other CD burning programs gave me the USB-HDD burning option that they recommended, so I went ahead with the installation.  I didn't bother closing my other programs before installing.  Then I ran it as they suggested.  The result was not encouraging.  When I clicked on the drive in Windows Explorer, I got an indication that the drive was not formatted.  I took it out and put it into the test computer anyway.  When I rebooted, to my surprise I got, "Start booting from USB device."  I hadn't yet copied the I386 folder to the USB drive -- couldn't, because the source computer wasn't recognizing it -- but now I yanked it out of the target (I had hit the Pause key at that point in the target machine, so it was just sitting there, politely waiting its turn) and shoved it back into the source machine, which now recognized the jump drive as drive I: (BartPE).  I copied the I386 folder.  While that was underway, I did a quick search for the option of installing XP from the I386 folder on drive C, which I had kind of forgotten about.  It looked like a hassle, so I didn't bother with it at this point.  The I386 copy process got interrupted by an irritating Windows message that one of the files in the I386 folder was being used, so I tried again, copying this time from the I386 folder on the slipstreamed WinXP SP3 CD.

When the I386 folder was all copied to the USB drive, I jerked it out of the source machine and rammed it back into the same USB port in the test machine.  I hit a key to un-pause that machine's boot process, but got "Disk Error -- Press any key to restart."  I did that.  Now BartPE loaded.  It flashed a Windows XP opening screen, so I knew WinXP was there somewhere.  Next, BartPE gave me a screen for DiskInternals.  I killed that.  It wanted to know if I wanted to start network support.  I said no.  I didn't see the DiskPart program described in the webpage, and actually I would have rather used GParted for that anyway.  I tried DiskInternals Partition Recovery, which seemed to be the closest thing to a partitioner, but it didn't look right.  I inserted the GParted CD and went to BartPE's Go > Shut down > Restart option.  On reboot, I went back into the BIOS setup and set the CD-ROM drive to boot before the USB-HDD.

Then I decided I didn't need to be fooling with the test machine anymore.  This USB drive appeared to be working.  So I put the GParted CD into the laptop instead, and also changed its BIOS boot order as just described.  I used GParted to set up a 25GB NTFS partition and then rebooted with the USB drive.  It booted!  This time around, I skipped the partitioning and formatting step described on that webpage, and instead went to BartPE's Go > Command Prompt.  This put me at an X:\minint\System32 prompt.  I guessed this meant that X was the drive letter assigned to the USB drive.  So I did a "CD \I386" and, sure enough, there it was.  So I ran the command they indicated:

X:\i386\winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource /noreboot

Woo hoo -- a WinXP installation screen!  But then, dammit, an error:

Setup cannot continue because upgrade functionality is disabled and your copy of Windows XP only allows upgrades.

Now what?  I had never gotten this before.  There was, as far as I knew, no problem with the CD itself.  A search suggested no obvious solutions.  I suspected this might be a problem caused by the use of a slipstreamed CD with the BartPE process.  I decided to try again with the second approach, to see if that cheap 2GB USB drive could also be made bootable, but using an original Windows XP SP2 CD in that process.  While that was doing its thing, I took another look at that option of installing WinXP from the I386 folder.  I found a webpage that suggested using winnt.exe instead of winnt32.exe.  Unfortunately, I was not sure how to replace the other options in the foregoing winnt32 command.  (Later, I saw somewhere that the command to use would have been X:\i386\winnt /s:X:\i386, where the /S switch defines the location of the startup files).

By this time, BartPE had finished being reinstalled on the cheap 2GB USB drive.  I checked and noticed that the installed files (including /I386) filled 934MB.  The I386 files filled about 2/3 of that by themselves.  I rebooted the laptop with the cheap 2GB drive plugged in, and it worked.  Conclusion:  the UBCD4Win process did not work, at least not unless I wanted to reinstall UBCD4Win, in case it had become screwed up during my previous use of it.  But then, spoke too soon:  the cheap 2GB drive produced the same BSOD I had gotten when trying to install WinXP from the CD.  Why would the same BartPE process work with SP3 and not SP2?  I replaced the SP2 files on the cheap USB with SP3 files (using Beyond Compare to avoid having to recopy everything) and tried again with the cheap USB.  While this was underway, I also tried booting from the SP3 CD again, as I had done at the start of this post.  Nope:  still a BSOD.  When the cheap USB had the SP3 files, I tried booting it.  Nope:  still a BSOD.  So apparently there was some difference between the Diesel USB and the cheap USB.  I tried the Diesel USB once again, just to be sure.  Sure enough; once again it loaded BartPE.

Next, I downloaded WinSetupFromUSB.  It didn’t seem to have a homepage of its own; that link was the first in a long thread about it, and there was a download link there.  It came in a .7z form, and for some reason right-clicking didn’t open up the usual Windows XP “Extract” option, so I used 7-zip to extract it.  It was a standalone; no installation process needed.  It didn’t detect anything on the cheap USB drive, but it gave me options to reformat it with either Bootice or RMPrepUSB.  But then it didn’t seem to be working, so I killed it (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and started it again.  This time it identified it as 2020MB Total (FAT) and gave me an error indicating that I should not be using FAT16 on a drive > 2GB.  So apparently those other instructions were mistaken, and maybe this was why the cheap USB hadn't worked as well as the 4GB Diesel.

I clicked on Bootice and left the Destination Disk setting at the default USB.  The Bootice tooltip had recommended using Grub for DOS, so I clicked Process MBR and chose Grub for DOS > Install / Config.  I left the default settings as they were and went with Save to Disk.  This said, “GRUB4DOS is successfully installed onto this disk!  Please copy GRLDR (and optional menu.lst) to the root of any partition of this disk.”  I clicked OK > Return > Return.  This put me back to the main Bootice dialog.  Following the tooltip, I clicked Perform Format > USB-HAD HAD (Single Partition) and chose NTFS.  I got, “The partition has been formatted successfully.  You can install some kind of MBR and PBR onto it now.”  I had already done the MBR, though, and when I clicked on that it seemed to be indicating that I would be changing the MBR, so I went on to the PBR option.  I left it at NTLDR and hit Install / Config.  This, too, seemed to have been done already.  But then, when I exited all dialogs back to the WinSetFromUSB introductory dialog, I got an error message:

Could not find primary partition on the selected disk!

Please insert USB disk with a primary partition on it and click Refresh button.

I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong, so I clicked Refresh.  Same error again.  It went away after a few seconds, so I tried RMPrepUSB instead of Bootice.  Here, the steps were numbered.  In step 3, I changed Boot Options to XP.  I went looking for the manual and, in WinSetupFromUSB\files\tools, I found RMPrepUSB.pdf.  (There didn’t seem to be a manual there for Bootice.)  This PDF said that I would have to indicate files to be copied to the USB drive here, in step 5, if I wanted the drive to be bootable.  But what files?  I wasn’t sure, so I just went with this part.  (I noticed RMPrepUSB offered an image “File to USB” button.  From the readme PDF, it seemed this would be useful only if you already had an ISO or other image containing everything that would be needed to boot a USB drive as distinct from a CD.  I didn’t have that, so I didn’t use this.)  Then I clicked on 6, Prepare Drive.  Something went wrong at this point, probably in my choices or in another program I was running.  The system nearly froze, and I had to use Ctrl-Alt-Delete to shut down this program and another one.  I tried WinSetupFromUSB > Bootice again.  It registered the drive as formatted in FAT32, so I went to the PBR button and clicked Install / Config > OK > Return.  Next, Process MBR > Grub for DOS > Install/Configure > Save to Disk.  It said something about installing GRLDR and menu.lst to the root of any partition.  After a search and a look at several websites, I still didn’t know what or where GRLDR was, or which menu.lst to install.  Finally I found a guide on how to use WinSetupFromUSB.  This guide was unfortunately somewhat outdated.  I followed its advice in a modified sense:  I copied the entire WinXP installation CD to a new folder on drive C, and indicated that in step 5 in RMPrepUSB.  Then I clicked step 6, the Prepare Drive button, along with the other OK buttons etc. needed to get it underway.  It spent maybe a half-hour copying the contents of the WinXP installation CD to the USB drive.

When it was done, I clicked Exit and ejected the USB drive.  Before ejecting, I noticed that the contents of the drive appeared identical to those of a WinXP CD; but during the process, I had noticed a brief reference to the possibility that two partitions were being created on the jump drive, and that maybe one of them was hidden.  Maybe this would be the boot partition, and it would make it so that the jump drive really would function like a boot CD.  Maybe.  About this time, I also realized that this might have been a partly wasted effort, insofar as the cheap USB drive had not been a star performer so far; I just hadn't wanted to wipe out that hard-won Diesel drive until I thought I might have a better alternative.

At this point, I used one of the foregoing processes to make a SanDisk Cruzer 4GB flash drive bootable.  I did not record which process; it was late and I went to bed while it was underway.  A day or two passed before I got back to this project.  I booted the laptop with the SanDisk, hit Esc and then F9, and saw that I did have the SanDisk as a boot option.  It did start booting.  It went through "Starting BartPE" and showed the WinXP startup screen, but then collapsed into a BSOD.

I went back to the approach that had worked with the Diesel USB.  This time, it occurred to me, I might not need to go through the long process of copying I386 to the jump drive.  That would be necessary for a situation where a CD drive was not available; but in this situation I did have a drive that would (I hoped) read the I386 file from the WinXP installation CD.  It took only a minute or so for UltraISO to make the Diesel bootable.  When that was done, I closed UltraISO, ejected the Diesel, inserted it into the laptop, put the WinXP CD in the laptop's CD drive, booted the laptop, and did the Esc-F9 sequence on startup.  This time, unfortunately, the Diesel didn't work either; another BSOD.  I thought maybe the problem was that the machine didn't even want to see the WinXP CD, so I tried again, booting the Diesel, without the WinXP CD in the drive, but no:  BSOD again.

At this point, I abandoned this bootable USB approach.  The Diesel USB had worked the first time, to the point of giving me a command prompt.  It might work again, if I kept playing with it.  But by now I had come up with some other possible approaches, so I returned to the effort described in a separate post.

Windows XP SP3 CD Won't Boot

I was trying to install Windows XP on a Compaq Presario CQ60-420US laptop. I had just gotten it back from HP service in Texas, where they supposedly replaced the motherboard to fix a nonworking wired network interface card (NIC). They had reinstalled Vista on it, which I thought was very nice of them, and now the NIC still did not work for purposes of accessing the Internet, but did work for half of a crossover cable connection with another computer. That is, the other computer could access the laptop, but not vice versa.

So I had decided to try to see if WinXP would fare better than Vista on these problems. I wiped out the Vista partition, used GParted to create a new partition, and stuck the WinXP installation CD into the CD drive. Unfortunately, XP would not boot from the CD. GParted had just booted from the CD, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t the drive hardware per se. With the WinXP CD inserted, the computer would recognize that there was a CD in its drive, and would say, “Press any key to boot from CD,” but this just caused the thing to grind away, apparently trying to read and act upon the information on the CD, before eventually (after maybe five minutes) giving me a BSOD (blue screen of death).

I found that this problem occurred with a WinXP CD, containing slipstreamed SP3, that I had used to install XP on another computer; but it appeared somewhat different with an SP2 XP CD.   With that CD, the system went all the way through "Setup is loading files" and said, "Setup is starting Windows" before giving me the BSOD.  Then again, this may have been what was happening when the SP3 CD was grinding away; perhaps it was just not reporting all of the drivers it was loading.

To fix this, one suggestion said to disable BIOS virus detection. But the BIOS did not have a virus detection option. Someone else said laptop CDs are not eager to boot from DVDs, but this was definitely WinXP on a CD.

The BIOS Setup seemed willing to let me try to boot from a USB drive. I wondered if I could install WinXP from a 4GB USB jump drive that I had lying around. To try it, I rearranged the Boot Order so that USB Diskette on Key / USB Hard Drive came first. I wasn’t too sure how to do the rest of this process, so I started by just copying the WinXP CD directly to a 4GB USB drive. While that was underway, I researched the question and found that there were many websites on how to do this, and all of them sounded complicated.

At the same time, I continued trying to figure out what was wrong with the laptop’s DVD drive. One source said that they solved the problem by flashing the BIOS on the laptop. This seemed like a more comprehensive kind of solution, so I decided to try this second – right after inserting the USB drive with a copy of the Windows XP CD and verifying that, no, it wouldn’t install WinXP by itself; booting from that USB drive would just give me “Invalid system disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key.”

It seemed odd that the system would boot a Vista CD but would require a BIOS update in order to boot a WinXP CD.  Or at least it had booted a Vista installation CD previously.  I decided to try that again.  Sure enough, with the Vista installation CD inserted, I got “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD” and then “Windows is loading files.”  I thought about trying to slipstream Vista into a WinXP CD, but got some warnings that maybe this would not be a good idea.

So, continuing with the current plan, I went to the HP-Compaq download page and looked for a WinXP BIOS update for this laptop.  All I saw there was a firmware update named sp43474.exe, for the GSA-T50L optical drive, dated April 2009.  Firefox 3.5.8 wouldn’t download it to my other computer; I had to right-click and use the IE View extension to download successfully.  The problem now was that this update was an .exe file, which I would only be able to install from within a running Windows installation.  Catch-22!

Just to be sure, I double-clicked on the sp43474.exe file on the other computer.  It said, “This software update will upgrade the firmware of your system’s optical drive GSA-T50L to rev SC05.”  I had done a printout to PDF from a system information utility before sending the laptop to Texas, so now I searched it for a reference to this model of DVD drive.  It said that, actually, what I had (at least before sending the laptop to Texas) was an Optiarc DVD RW AD-7561S ATA Device.  This seemed to be made by Sony, whereas the GSA-T50L was made by LG.  I supposed that both might ultimately have been made by the same Chinese sweatshop somewhere, but I preferred to try to find a driver for the Optiarc.  But I was curious why my laptop would have an unofficial CD drive.  I was not able to find any references to the Sony Optiarc AD-7561S drive on the Sony Optiarc page, so apparently it was an older or in some sense unsupported model.  I stumbled across a recent thread in which someone else was tired of hassling with HP, couldn’t find a firmware update, and was at the point of just installing the wrong update to see what would happen.  Same problem in another thread.  I even found a thread on an official HP forum where they were talking about this problem.  As one participant in that last thread said, “There does not seem to be any updates for the 7561s at all.”  So, OK, updating the firmware was not an option; the more likely option was to send the machine back to HP for a replacement, assuming they were willing.  I couldn’t do that now -- I needed the laptop -- so we were back at the option of installing XP from the USB.  I went through a long effort of that nature, but ultimately abandoned it and came back to this post.

While that long effort was underway, I began looking into other possibilities.  One was to adapt an Acronis True Image backup (or you could try Macrium for freeware) of a Windows XP installation from another machine, so that it would work on this laptop's different hardware.  The Acronis option that I would need, to avoid a BSOD, seemed to be Universal Restore, which would apparently cost at least $365 (list).  Alternately, it seemed that OEMs use Sysprep to deploy the same operating system installation on many computers, but it looked like more hassle than it would be worth for just one system.  I also looked into the possibility of installing XP via network connection.  This led me to a site that specialized in boot disks.  I didn’t see how I could use any of that, unfortunately -- at least not without a substantial additional time commitment, which was impossible.

The effort to install XP from the USB did not pan out, so at this point I returned to this post.  There seemed to be two basic options.  Either find a way to develop or adapt an Acronis image from another machine so that it would work on the laptop, or get to a command prompt (via USB drive, network connection, or otherwise) and run an installation command (seemingly something like X:\i386\winnt /s:X:\i386, where the /S switch defines the location of the startup files) to install WinXP from scratch.

I wondered if (a) Windows updates were being designed and revised to defeat the Acronis approach and (b) it would be possible to bail out of a WinXP basic installation before installing many hardware drivers, and make an Acronis image at that point.  I tried that, but WinXP would crash almost immediately; and as with other efforts, it would not boot into Safe Mode either.  I figured that putting the Acronis image on the laptop would at least have installed the I386 folder there, so now maybe it was just a question of getting to a command prompt.  I didn't need BartPE on a USB stick for that; I could boot BartPE from a CD.  I had a CD version of BartPE from 2007.  I guessed it would probably work, since XP was much older than that.  But it seemed that whatever caused the laptop to crash when I had the WinXP CD inserted was also going to reject WinXP as part of a BartPE CD.

I also had an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win).  The UBCD ground away for a long time, eventually showed me the WinXP splash screen -- and didn't crash!  Instead, it gave me a choice, "Select shell to start." It still seemed to be in its process, so I waited, and it chose the automatic option for me.  It gave me an option of setting up networking, but I didn't know how to answer the question as to which sort.  I tried to cancel, but it seemed intent upon continuing, so I just used the default options.  I went to Start > Command Prompt and typed DIR C: (using capital letters here just to indicate the actual command; DOS is not case-specific) and, no, the I386 folder was actually not installed there yet.  I put the WinXP CD in the CD drive and typed DIR X: because it looked like X was the letter that UBCD had assigned to the CD drive.  I typed COPY X:\I386 C:\ and it copied files.  Then it froze.  I killed that window and tried running Start > Programs > File Management > Explorers.  None of the explorer programs would run.  Eventually I realized this was because I had removed the UBCD disc.  I put it back in and tried again.  The explorers still didn't work.  I had belatedly realized that COPY was probably not the best command, so I tried XCOPY X:\I386 C:\I386 /E /H /Y.  It copied lots of stuff, and not the way I intended.  Now all the stuff that should have been in the C:\I386 folder was instead in the root (C:\) folder.  Oops.  I wound up deleting it all and starting over.  There were just a few files in C:\ that I couldn't delete (i.e., biosinfo.inf, bootfix.bin, config.sys, and mstask.inf), and of course several folders (i.e., Documents and Settings, I386, Program Files, and Windows).  Problem:  there was no WINNT.EXE file to be found.  On my other computer, it was in C:\I386, but it was not in that folder on either the laptop or the WinXP CD.  I carried it over via jump drive.  It took UBCD a minute to recognize the jump drive, but it did.  I typed WINNT.EXE and hit Enter.  I got this:

Windows XP Setup

This program does not run on any 32-bit version of Windows.

Use WINNT32.EXE instead.

Setup cannot continue.  Press ENTER to exit.

So, OK, I jumped WINNT32*.* over to C:\I386.  (The USB flash drive was recognized as drive G, as I discovered by feeling around.  That is, I tried D: and got a partition; tried E: and got a partition; tried F: and got an error; tried G: anyway and there it was.)  But it froze.  It would copy the WINNT32.* files, but not the WINNT32*.DLL files, not even one at a time.  I tried running C:\I386\WINNT32.EXE anyway.  It gave me an error:

The file C:\I386\WINNT32U.DLL could not be loaded or is corrupt.  Setup cannot continue.

I didn't have that particular one on the jump drive, so I went back to the source machine and tried to jump it over.  But I got the same problem:  the command window froze and had to be killed.  I rebooted the computer with an Ubuntu 9.10 CD and then copied all of the WINNT32*.* files (and a WINNT32 folder) from the source computer to the laptop's C:\I386 via jump drive.  Back in UBCD, I tried running that same WINNT32 command and got that same "could not be loaded or is corrupt" error.  One post suggested this sort of message might be due to insufficient RAM.  A Microsoft webpage said that I should double-click on WINNT32.MSI.  I wasn't in a GUI, so I just tried typing WINNT32.MSI at the command line.  This opened a dialog asking me what program I wanted to use to open this kind of file.

Since I had a command prompt using UBCD, I tried a different approach.  The command I used this time was:

X:\i386\winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource

But this gave me an error, stating that this command was not recognized.  I tried it again, inserting a BartPE jump drive and replacing X: with H: since H was where the jump drive was.  This worked, but it just gave me the same error message I had gotten a long time earlier:

Setup cannot continue because upgrade functionality is disabled and your copy of Windows XP only allows upgrades.

I tried replacing H with C, since I had already copied I386 to C.  This just gave me the message about WINNT32U.DLL being unloadable or corrupt.  One post led me to think that this problem might be unique to my WinXP SP3 disc, so I loaded an SP2 disc and tried winnt32.exe with that.  That did not seem to achieve anything:  the disc spun up and then down and I was back at the command prompt.  I tried it again with the SP3 CD.  Same result.  Apparently I had mistyped the command previously.

I thought maybe I could run winnt if I could find a 16-bit DOS equivalent.  My search led to FreeDOS, where I downloaded FDFullCD.iso.  I burned it and booted the laptop with it.  I indicated that I wanted to boot FreeDOS, and then chose option 3, FreeDOS Live CD with HIMEM + EMM386.  But I got this error:

Selected page frame e000 not available, searching automatically

No suitable page frame found.  EMS functions limited.

I gathered that EMM386 was not a good option in this case.  I rebooted and tried again, this time choosing option 4, HIMEM only.  This produced a bunch of error messages, but at least it put me to an A: prompt.  Drive B appeared to be a RAM drive.  The program did not recognize drive C.  I thought this must be because it was an NTFS drive, but no, FreeDOS did not recognize any drive, including the CD drive.  I booted FreeDOS again, and this time chose option 5, FreeDOS Live CD only.  I still got some error messages, including "There is no CDROM, or the wrong CD-ROM!"

I guessed that whatever kept this CD-ROM drive from recognizing WinXP was also impairing its recognition of the FreeDOS CD somewhat.     In that case, I wondered if I could install the contents of the WinXP CD from a bootable FreeDOS USB drive.  To make that, I followed instructions to install Unetbootin on my Ubuntu machine, and then used Unetbootin to make a FreeDOS bootable USB stick.  When that was done, I checked its properties and saw that Ubuntu indicated the filesystem type was msdos.  I copied the /I386 folder from the slipstreamed WinXP SP3 CD to the USB stick, put the USB into the laptop, and rebooted.  After a Unetbootin screen, I was back at the FreeDOS menu.  I tried option 3; same errors as before.  I tried option 5.  This time, it recognized the USB drive as drive C.  Then I realized that this was no help; it still couldn't see the partition on the hard drive where I wanted to install WinXP.  Well, could I reformat that partition as FAT32?  I formatted another USB drive as FAT32, put it into the laptop, and rebooted from the FreeDOS stick.  It did recognize the FAT32 USB drive.  Now, could I install WinXP on a FAT32 partition?  It looked like it was supposed to be possible.  I pulled out the USB drives, rebooted the laptop with GParted, and replaced the NTFS partition where I had planned to install WinXP with a FAT32 partition.  (I figured this would be much faster than trying to convert from NTFS to FAT32.)  Of course, now I was wondering whether the FAT32 alternative would also have made a crucial difference with some of the attempts to install from UBCD.  When GParted was done, I rebooted with the FreeDOS stick.  Sure enough, now I could see the FreeDOS stick as drive C and the WINXP partition as drive D.  I tried using XCOPY, but it didn't work.  I wasn't sure how to copy subfolders etc. in FreeDOS.  Rather than research it, I removed the FreeDOS USB, rebooted with UBCD, plugged in the FreeDOS stick, found that WINXP was now drive C and the FreeDOS stick was drive G, and therefore used XCOPY G:\I386\*.* C:\I386 /E /H /Y to copy the I386 folder from the FreeDOS to WINXP.  This time around, that ran very smoothly.  I rebooted with the FreeDOS USB stick.  I went into the I386 folder on the WINXP partition (which was drive D in this case), and typed WINNT.  Windows XP Setup asked me where the XP files were located.  It defaulted to D:\I386, so I left it at that.  Next, it said this:

Windows XP Professional Setup

Setup did not detect SmartDrive on your computer.  SmartDrive will greatly improve the performance of this phase of Windows Setup.

You should exit now, start SmartDrive, and then restart Setup.  See your DOS documentation for details about SmartDrive.

I looked into SmartDrive.  Along the way, I ran across the ingenious suggestion that I could use an IDE to USB adapter and, with that, could use the internal CD drive on a desktop computer as an external drive for some other computer (if I had needed to do that).  (This would require leaving the CD drive's power connected in the host computer.)  SmartDrive itself was an MS-DOS disk cache program, to speed up file transfer times.  It appeared that FreeDOS might have its own cache arrangement, presumably faster if I could get HIMEM and/or EMM386 to load.  The best I could do was to reboot, choose FreeDOS option 3, ignore the FreeDOS boot error messages, and continue past the WinXP setup message about SmartDrive.  WinXP setup next said, "Please wait while Setup copies files to your hard disk."  It copied files for a while, and then froze.  I had heard something about how WINNT would only start the process, so I rebooted with UBCD, went into C:\I386, and typed "winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource" and, this time, it worked!  It gave me "Welcome to Windows Setup" and then asked for my WinXP's product key.  I went through the various options, accepting the defaults (including the offer to upgrade my drive to NTFS), and it began the installation process.  It estimated that it would take 52 minutes, instead of the usual 39.  But then something happened.  I turned away, and when I looked back, we were back at the UBCD prompt.  I ran WINNT32 again, just like before, but this time I said No to the option of upgrading to NTFS.  It didn't matter.  I ran it a third time, and again it crashed, shortly after it finished "Copying Installation Files."  No error message or anything.  I rebooted UBCD and tried installing again from the I386 folder that I had added to the bootable FreeDOS USB drive, using the command "G:\i386\winnt32 /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource" (because G was where the system saw the FreeDOS USB drive).

So now I wondered whether I could boot to a very WinXP-compatible 32-bit command line.  I started with Vista.  My Vista installation was not booting at this point, probably because I had told GParted to hide the Vista partition, so I inserted the Vista DVD and rebooted.  I went with its Repair Your Computer option but didn't proceed with the repair, choosing instead the steps necessary to get a command prompt.  I inserted the FreeDOS USB and found it at drive H.  But before trying it, I went to C:\I386 and ran that WINNT32 command again.  It proceeded just as it had done in UBCD, except I didn't recall having to agree to the license agreement in the UBCD process.  It crashed -- it put me back to the command line -- just as it had done in UBCD.  I tried again, this time starting from the I386 folder in the FreeDOS USB.  I even swapped out the Vista CD for the WinXP CD, just in case that would make any difference.  It didn't.  Another crash.  I took out all bootable items, rebooted, and got "Disk error.  Press any key to restart."  So, no, it had not by some magic completed the process.

I rebooted UBCD.  On another computer, I copied C:\Windows\system32\chkdsk.exe to a new Utilities folder on the FreeDOS USB.  I plugged in the FreeDOS USB, navigated to C:, and typed D:\Utilities\chkdsk /r.  It ran.  I told it to force a dismount.  It quickly checked files and slowly checked free space.  It found no problems.  I rebooted with GParted and had it check the filesystem on the WINXP partition.  No problem there either.  I wondered if the presence of even a hidden Vista partition was screwing things up for WinXP.  I deleted both partitions and recreated WINXP.  The WinXP CD would still not boot.  The Vista CD would still boot, and it gave me a command line from which I could run winnt32.  Even so, it crashed again.  I wondered whether the problem was with my SP3 CD.  I made another folder on the FreeDOS USB, naming it I386-SP2, and copied the I386 folder to it from the WinXP SP2 CD that I had used in making the SP3 CD (i.e., having the same product key).  I tried running WINNT32 again from the Vista command prompt, using this I386-SP2 folder as the source.  This gave me an error:

Setup was unable to build the list of files to be copied.

The system cannot find the path specified.

I verified that the WINXP partition was still drive C, and that it contained an I386 folder.  The problem seemed to be that the I386 folder has to be named I386 -- nothing more, nothing less.  I renamed I386-SP2 to be I386 and re-ran the WINNT32 command.  It crashed again, in exactly the same way as before.  I checked C: to see what WINNT32 was actually doing there.  The answer: not much.  It was creating files named $WIN_NT$, with the extensions .~BT and .~LS, along with a file named textsetup.sif, and it had copied NTLDR over.  And that was about it.  I deleted those $WIN_NT$ files and tried WINNT32 again, this time using the product code from my other WinXP CD.  It crashed, of course.

Someone said that a problem something like this one sounded like it might be due to a bad CPU or other hardware.  Of course, that was always possible.  I wasn't ready for that yet; after all, everything else seemed to work OK.  But I was running out of other theories.  Then I stumbled into a search from which I gathered that "downgrade" was an official searchable term, especially where Vista was concerned.  PC Magazine had a two method article, but neither method would work for me since I wasn't able to boot from the XP CD.  I found what looked like the consummate downgrading guide, with specific information for my laptop model.  For a CQ60 with an Intel CPU, it seemed to say that I should slipstream the ICH9 SATA driver (ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller) into the XP installer using nLite.  To get the ICH9, I downloaded and unzipped f6flpy3289.zip, but I did not understand why the highly regarded CherylG was telling me that I would find my driver inside iaAHCI.inf.  In the process of digging around for the driver she named, I contracted a virus, which prompted me to get up-to-date on Spybot Search and Destroy and on the Web of Trust add-on for Firefox.  I eventually found the driver on an HP webpage (though not the downloads webpage for my laptop).  I ran it on another computer (it was an .exe file) and it tried to install itself but then said the computer didn't meet the requirements, which I assume meant something about its particular CPU.  The conclusion there seemed to be that it would help to run it on a computer whose hardware was very different from the target computer, so that it would just extract but would not install.  I didn't know if it would run on the laptop from the Vista prompt, but anyway this was not the concept of slipstreaming, so I went back to the first one that CherylG had pointed toward.  Then I downloaded nLite and looked at the recommended guide for slipstreaming the driver.  Now that I saw the guide, I understood why CherylG was pointing me toward an .inf file.  She apparently didn't mean that I somehow had to extract the driver from iaAHCI.inf; I just had to include that .inf file in the slipstream.  This seemed to be the only thing I had to slipstream, so I went ahead with it.

The slipstreaming process began by copying the entire SP3 CD to a folder on the hard drive that I called SP3CD.  I started to install nLite, which required the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.  Installing that required trying to update .NET Framework 1.1 and then downloading a tool to uninstall it when the updates failed, and then manually doing registry edits etc. to uninstall it when the tool failed.  That ran overnight.  Next morning, when that was done, I followed the MaxEasyGuide to slipstreaming with nLite.  The first time, for some reason, it did nothing.  Second time, it made a file that I called SP3-SATA.ISO, containing the ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller driver from within iaAHCI.inf -- and now I understood what CherylG was saying.  Next question:  what was I supposed to do with this thing?  I decided to open it with UltraISO and copy its I386 folder to another folder.  Then I ran Beyond Compare to see how different it was from the original slipstreamed SP3 I386 folder.  It looked like there were a couple dozen differences in files.  So, OK, the nLite process seemed to have done something.  I wasn't sure I had done all of these steps right, but I decided to give it a shot.  I used Beyond Compare to synchronize the I386 folder on the FreeDOS USB with the I386 folder I had just extracted from SP3-SATA.ISO.  Whoa.  Many, many differences.  I forgot -- I had been using the SP2 I386 folder.  I changed that around and re-ran the comparison.  Still tons of differences!  Oh, I knew why.  It was because of the timechange.  The files were mostly the same, but some had been created an hour before the others of similar name.  I told Beyond Compare to ignore unimportant differences and did a full refresh, but that made no difference.  I bit the bullet and upgraded 6,992 files on the FreeDOS USB.  While that was underway, I re-ran the nLite and Beyond Compare processes, just to be sure.  Everything looked good.  I put the updated FreeDOS USB drive into the laptop and re-ran the WINNT32 command.  Alas, that wasn't the answer.

I found another thread that seemed to say that CherylG's advice on drivers was for an AMD CPU, whereas my CQ60-420US had an Intel CPU.  But some respondents said they were definitely using the Intel drivers and it still wasn't working.  Unfortunately, the drivers they pointed to were no longer availlable at the Intel website.  Daniel Potyrala advised that I download and run CPU-Z in order to find out not only my CPU type but also my chipset.  I couldn't very well run CPU-Z without an operating system.  Since it seemed that having Vista on the same hard drive did not explain why I could not even run WINNT32, it seemed to be time to restore the Vista partition using GParted and Acronis.  Adam Pash assured me that it didn't matter which came first, WinXP or Vista, so I left the WinXP partition in place (in hopes that it would someday be operational) and just added the Vista partition behind it.  I downloaded the appropriate version of CPU-Z, jumped it over to the laptop, and installed and ran it.  CPU-Z said that my mainboard chipset was an Intel GL40, which meant that I needed to slipstream . . .  the ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller driver, just like before.  So Mr. Potyrala was wrong; CherylG had given me the right tip.  But then Fernando1 said there were different drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs.  My T4200 Pentium (Penryn) was a 64-bit.  It was hard to tell the two apart; the driver names were the same.  I repeated the nLite process.  This time, the Textmode driver I selected was the ICH9 SATA AHCI Controller (Desktop ICH9R).  There were, again, some differences, so once again I updated the FreeDOS USB drive and tried it in the laptop, this time typing  "I:\i386\winnt32 /syspart:F: /tempdrive:F: /makelocalsource" because the FreeDOS USB was at I: and the WinXP partition was now at F.  That didn't work, so I tried once more, this time selecting the ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID Controller.  That didn't work either.

It was time to quit.  The webpages to remember, for future reference, included Quang Do's post in an HP forum, listing drivers and their sources; ditto Riskyone101; and perhaps a post, by wimb, that I really didn't understand.  The approach to remember was to use Unetbootin in Ubuntu to quickly create a FreeDOS bootable USB drive, if I needed 16-bit support, or just a Vista DVD or UBCD, if I could go straight to 32-bit support; to format the target drive in FAT32 rather than NTFS if necessary; to use nLite to create a slipstreamed ISO, assuming I could find the right drivers, and UltraISO to extract files from that ISO to load via USB drive if necessary.  I didn't know why WinXP could not run on the laptop, and I wasn't sure what else to try at this point.

Notes on Converting Word Processing Documents from 1985-1995

I was using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and VMware Workstation 6.5.2, running Windows XP virtual machines (VMs) as guests. I was trying, in one of those VMs, to convert some data files from the 1980s and 1990s. This post conveys some notes from that process.

I had used a number of different database, spreadsheet, and word processing programs back then. The filenames had extensions like .sec and .95. These suggested that the file in question was probably not a spreadsheet (whose extensions would probably have been .wks or .wk1 or .wq1). I suspected these were word processing docs, but what kind?

I had a copy of WordPerfect Office X4, so I tried opening them in that. The formats I had used principally back then were WordStar (3.3, I think), WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, XyWrite III+, and plain ASCII text. So for some documents it took several tries, telling WordPerfect X4 to try these different formats, before the document would open properly. Even then, not all of them did.

I also tried the approach of highlighting a bunch of these files, right-clicking, and indicating that I wanted to convert them to Adobe Acrobat 8, or to combine them in Acrobat. Unfortunately, these efforts tended to cause Windows Explorer and/or Acrobat to crash.

It occurred to me to try another approach. I left Windows in VMware and dropped down to Ubuntu. I selected 57 files that I wanted to convert. OpenOffice 3.0 Writer started up by default. It opened them all. They had been last modified in 1993 and thereabouts. I think they were created with Word 3.1. For each file, I clicked a button and got a PDF created in the same folder with the same name and a PDF extension.

OOo Writer wasn't able to open some WordStar 3.3 files from the mid-1980s. Several sources referred me to Advanced Computer Innovations for that sort of conversion. Their prices weren't bad, but I didn't want to pay $1 per file per 50K for these old materials. Instead, I looked into old Microsoft converters.  Those, unfortunately, did not appear to be available anymore.  A search led to a forum that led to WordStar.org converters.  Those, however, did not appear to go back to WordStar for DOS 3.3.  Graham Mayor's page looked like a better bet.  It gave me a Wrdstr32.zip file, but by the time I got around to it, I had already addressed my needs, so I didn't actually try this one.

Separately, somehow, I found (or maybe I had always retained) a copy of a program that seemed willing to install "Microsoft Word 97 Supplemental Converters."  Searching for this led to a Microsoft page where I was able to download the Word 97-2000 Import Converter (wrd97cnv.exe); unfortunately, that proved to be a backwards conversion from Word 97 to Word 95.  Trying again, I found that the Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit webpage led to a list of downloads that included an Office Converter Pack that I downloaded (oconvpck.exe).  I seem to have installed this, and I think this is what ultimately did the job for me.

Resources for converting XyWrite III+ files were pretty scarce by now, a decade after what appears to have been the last (short-lived) effort to reconstruct a manual of its text-formatting codes. Apparently nobody who has a copy of the paper manual has gotten around to PDFing and posting it; or perhaps Nota Bene (which apparently bought XyWrite in the 1990s), for some reason, is unwilling to allow any such reference to be made available. But here are some examples of codes used, from what I've been able to figure out and recall:

«PT23» start using proportional type font no. 23
«PG» page break
«TS5,10» set tabs 5 and 10 spaces to the right
«DC1=A 1 a» set DC1 outline structure (first level = A, B, C ...)
lm=0 set left text margin at zero characters (i.e., not indented)
«FC» format centered, i.e., center text
«MDBO» begin boldface
«MDNM» end special formatting (e.g., boldface)
«SPi» set page number to i (e.g., for preface)



I also had some old .wpd (WordPerfect) documents.  Not all of them had .wpd extensions to begin with.  To bulk rename the ones that didn't, I searched for a bulk renamer, to rename them all to be .wpd files.  I tried Bulk Rename, but its interface was complex and inflexible compared to that of ExplorerXP -- just select the files you want to rename, press F2, and set the parameters.

Once I had the files named with .wpd extensions, the next question was, how to get them into PDF format.  That was easy with the others, above, to the extent that Microsoft Word could read them; I could PDF them from there.  I shouldn't say it was "easy"; it was still a manual process, and I was now searching for a way to automate it.  Unfortunately, I was not finding any freeware ways to convert from .wpd to .pdf.  Later versions of WordPerfect include a Conversion Utility to bring those files into the modern era, but they are still wpd files.  Adobe Acrobat 8.0 was able to recognize and convert the files (select multiple files in Windows Explorer, right-click and choose the Convert to PDF option), but they proceed one by one, and I had hundreds of files, and it took several seconds for each one to process.  Also, it added an extra blank page to the ends of some if not all of these old WordPerfect documents.  I didn't find any wpd to odt (OpenOffice Writer) converters.  I thought about trying Google Docs, which someone said could bulk convert to pdf, but they didn't accept wpd as input.  I tried looking for a converter from wpd to doc, and that led me to Zamzar.com, which would convert directly from .wpd to .pdf, but would only let me upload one file at a time. I found that the Options in OpenOffice (I was using the Ubuntu version) could be set to save automatically as Word documents, so I did that, and then uploaded a few of them to Google Docs and downloaded them as PDFs.  The formatting was messed up on a couple of them.  I tried a comparison without Google Docs, just converting to pdf from the .doc files that OpenOffice had saved.  The formatting was better that way, so Google Docs didn't add anything; and the process of converting the Word docs to PDF was the same one-file-at-a-time thing as if I were printing from WordPerfect itself, so involving Word didn't add anything either.  In the end, the best and probably fastest approach seemed to be to select a bunch of wpd files in Windows Explorer, right-click and select Convert to Adobe PDF.

This seemed likely to be a continuing effort, but these notes ended here.