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You might also try http://iptrackeronline.com/header.php. It’s very similar to satrow’s link, though seems to do a little better on AOL addresses.

Keep in mind none of these work all that well on webmail senders (like hotmail, AOL, gmail, et al) — which makes sense if you stop to think about it. OTOH, if all you want is to see if the source is coming from overseas, they should be able to tell you that.

I exported a list of contacts from AOL as a CSV file, cleaned it up, saved it and then imported it into G-mail contacts. I only have three fields, FirstName, LastName & EMail.

I know you already found a workaround, but FWIW and for anyone else with the same problem, I think the trick is to rename the fields in your header row to what gmail itself uses. That way it doesn’t have to try and guess what each column represents.

Just export your existing gmail contacts to csv so you have gmail’s header row, then cut-and-paste the data from your AOL csv into the appropriate columns of your gmail csv, and finally upload the gmail csv back into gmail.

I’ve used this method several times to migrate address books from AOL to gmail for friends and clients, including a hoarder with over 2400 contacts in AOL and another 1000 in an old Palm Treo.

I also use this technique so I can use Excel to make bulk cleanups to my contacts list. (Tip: to avoid duplication, do a mass delete of your online gmail contacts before reimporting your updated csv.) I like being able to manage complete contact data in one place–street addresses, email, and phone numbers. I put it all into Excel, import into gmail, and it gets synced to google voice and my smartphone automatically. Makes is a cinch to call, text, email, or locate in maps/navigation whenever I need.

my XP and Windows 7 is on the same computer. Just different drives.

So, all the hardware, devices etc. are the same for both systems….

No, the point is a virtual machine is a different “computer”. It has its own fake (emulated) “hardware” that is rarely the same as your real hardware. For instance, Windows installed in a default VirtualBox virtual machine will think it’s running on a ICH AC97 sound card and a ICH PIIX4 disk controller, even though that may not be what your real hardware is. Open Device Mgr inside a virtual machine and you’ll see different devices than the real hardware VirtualBox is running on.

The image you create will come from your real computer, but the restore will be made to a fake computer with different (fake) hardware. The result is the same as if you were moving XP between two physical computers.

Will a USB Memory stick work?

It depends on the BIOS, but probably not. The XP F6 routine only looks for floppy drives, so it will only work if the BIOS lets the memory stick emulate a floppy drive. I would expect it emulates a hard drive instead.

The issue is the SATA hard drive. Your XP CD does not have SATA drivers. The standard way around that is to get the SATA drivers for the tablet’s chipset and put them on a floppy disk, then when booting from the CD your first step will be to press F6 when prompted and load the drivers from the floppy. I’m not sure whether the tablet can use a USB floppy drive (most netbooks can), but at least this should give you a clue in what direction you need to be researching.

Some BIOS’s have a configuration option to change the hard drive mode from AHCI to ATA-compatible, which avoids the problem by making the SATA drive appear like a legacy IDE drive. Another option is to build a custom XP CD by slipsteaming the SATA drivers into it; there are numerous websites describing that process. Some people also claim a XP SP3 CD supposedly contains SATA drivers. Maybe some do, but the Dell SP3 CD I have does not and I still had to do the F6/floppy dance.

One problem you’ll run into is that the emulated “hardware” in a virtual machine isn’t the same as the hardware the XP image came from. The restored XP will think it’s running on a completely different computer, so you’ll at least get a bunch of those “found new hardware” balloons the first time the virtual machine tries to boot up.

The good news is the emulated hardware is mostly middle-of-the-road kind of stuff, so you should be able to find all the right drivers without too much trouble. However, the hardware changes will also most likely trigger WPA reactivation.

Note that if you have an OEM version of XP that is tied to the real computer’s bios, you’ll have trouble because the emulated bios in the virtual machine won’t match the requirement for OEM pre-activation.

Are your calendars local or on the internet?

I use Tbird 6.0.2 and Lightning 1.0b5 with a mix of both local (for myself only) and several internet calendars (google calendars) for group use.

For the internet calendars, I think it’s all kept on the internet (e.g., in the google calendar) and not on my computer. If I startup Tbird without an internet connection, I don’t see any of the events on those calendars.

For the local calendar, events are kept in a sqlite database, which is profiles/{acct-name}/calendar-data/local.sqlite in my Tbird folder.

I do not use passwords.

Among other things, you’ll need to go into Win7’s “Advanced sharing settings” and change “Password protected sharing” to “Turn off”.

29811-Haberdashers-Hall-002
This is probably the target, but impossible to remove. There is one screw fixing it to the base, but removing it makes no difference. Deciding it was probaly just a frame holding the actual drive in place, I removed the single screw at the top of the assembly, but still no movement.

George,

In your post #25, that’s a regular Dell Dimension minitower case from the mid-2000’s. The second photo is indeed your hard drive. The hard drive is attached to the bracket (the perforated steel part), and the bracket is anchored to the chassis. To remove the hard drive you must first remove the drive+bracket assembly, then detach the drive from the bracket. The “top” screw you removed holds the drive in the bracket, so removing it was premature. There’s no harm in that (so don’t bother putting the screw back in), but it’s not going to help you get the bracket out.

The bracket is anchored at four points: two finger tabs hook into the back side of the front panel, one screw holds the bracket to the case side (toward the bottom of your photo), and a second screw comes in from the outside, through the bottom of the case (on the right, in your photo). This illustration from a representative Dell manual should make it clear how the bracket is attached:

29819-dimension-drive

With the computer on its side, remove the two screws, then swing the computer around 180 degrees (from the orientation in your photo) so the front panel is toward your chest. See those two vertical, free-standing U-tabs on the bracket? Grab those tabs and pivot the bottom of the bracket (where you removed the interior screw) away from you, swinging it toward the rear of the tower. Once it is loose, you should be able to unhook the two finger tabs from the slots in the front panel. Carefully remove the two cables, and then you can remove the drive from the bracket.

Installation is the reverse. With the bracket angled, hook it onto the front panel, then swing it in place so you can insert the screws. Note the two cables are keyed and will only go in one way.

FTR, note this tower can take two hard drives, but you’d need a second bracket. (The brackets are identical, with no difference between the first and second brackets.) The manual illustration shows how the second bracket piggybacks on the first, with its finger tabs hooking into those two free-standing U-tabs on the first bracket.

FWIW, the Dimension 4600-4700 series cases came with both brackets, even if one was left empty. The Dimension 2400-3000 cases were identical to these except they only gave you one bracket, so if you wanted a second hard drive you had to find the extra bracket second-hand somewhere.

All wireless enabled printers I have used have a wired option too. Perhaps not advertised, but present nonetheless.

That used to be my experience, also, but not anymore. Consider these two products:

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/854289/HP-Officejet-4500-Wireless-Color-All/

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/850383/HP-Officejet-4500-Color-All-In/

Both are available at Office Depot, both have otherwise identical specs, and both even have the same model number. But one has ethernet (no wireless) while the other has wireless only (no ethernet).

I had a client who encountered a problem with this particular printer. She bought the wireless version, but it turned out HP’s implementation of WPA didn’t work with her old router. Her router was fine in all other respects, and her laptops have worked flawlessly with it via WPA for quite some time. The 4500 would work if encryption was shut off, but it just wouldn’t connect if WEP or WPA was turned on. And this version simply had no wired ethernet option.

She didn’t need it to be wireless anyway (her router and printer are next to each other in the same closet) and the ethernet model was also cheaper, so she took the printer back and swapped it for the ethernet version.

Then in step 3 of Joe’s reference, try clicking “Properties” instead of “Remove”. Change the password there to your new, correct password.

“. . . the referenced files I have encrypted with TrueCrypt.” What does that mean? Are you saying the files are within a Truecrypt container, or are you saying each file is itself encrypted?

I think your objective is probably not very different from what I do. I have a Truecrypt container on my internal hard drive’s data partition and another Truecrypt container on a flash drive. I periodically open both containers and backup files from one container to the other. I use Syncback-free to do the backing up, but the xcopy command should work just as well.

To troubleshoot, it’s important to know what OS you’re using and how you’re getting to the command prompt. If you’re on Vista/7, have you tried getting there by launching cmd.exe via “run as administrator”? Have you tried a simple “copy” command of a single file from the command prompt window? Those tests might give you some leads.

I loved my old C600–still my favorite case and keyboard of any laptop I’ve ever owned. But I reluctantly gave it up because of the outdated CPU, USB1, lack of high-resolution screen, and lack of support for large HDDs.

But back to the root problem of this thread, the HDD problems mentioned here are actually quite common and predictable. As Paul said, it all stems from the bios’ lack of support for HDDs larger than 137GB. (I answer this question a lot, so what follows is my boilerplate response.)

BIOS LIMITATION

Your computer’s bios cannot see beyond 137 GB. This is typical of most Dell laptops that use ATA/EIDE hard disks. Newer models that use SATA disks do not have this limitation.

The conservative advice is that you should not be using a hard disk the system does not support. You run the risk of data corruption unless you understand the technical compromises that have to be made to get it to work.

The danger occurs when attempting to access sectors beyond the first 137 GBs of the disk. Your older bios contains a sector counter that is only 28 bits wide, so it maxes out at 137 GB. Access attempts above that limit cause the bios counter to roll over back to zero and start counting up again. Thus, read/write attempts to the 138th GB would actually act on the 1st GB. If it’s a read attempt you retrieve the wrong data, and if it’s a write attempt you’ll corrupt data in the 1st GB.

In contrast, newer computers use a bios with a 48-bit sector counter, which can hold sector values corresponding to larger than 137 GB.

BIOS vs WINDOWS

The bios functions operate in 16-bit Real Mode. In contrast, Windows operates in 32-bit Protected Mode. When any computer boots, by design it must start out in Real Mode and then during the boot process Windows kicks the CPU into the faster, Protected Mode. At that point, it has to replace the 16-bit bios disk driver on the fly with its own 32-bit driver because Real Mode drivers cannot be used in Protected Mode.

Beginning with XP SP1, Microsoft started including an updated driver that is capable of accessing sectors beyond the 137-GB barrier. But that only works once you’re in Windows. Remember, at the very beginning of the boot sequence you start off in Real Mode, so the 137-GB limitation will apply for at least the beginning part of the boot process. If you can get Windows booted past the point where the 16-bit driver drops out of the loop, the system will finish booting and you’ll have access to the full content of the disk. The trick, though, is making sure you can get past that Real-Mode/Protected-Mode upshift during the boot process.

Common sense says one should not use a disk larger than 137 GB if the BIOS does not support it. That is also the official policy from both Dell and Microsoft. The risk is data corruption if write attempts are made beyond 137 GB. The risk doesn’t actually come from Windows, but from 16-bit utilities that operate outside Windows, such as some disk or partition management tools. For example, a 16-bit utility like Partition Magic will not work, but a 32-bit utility like Acronis Disk Director can.

If you use a disk larger than what the bios supports, you need to understand this risk. It should not present a problem if only Windows is allowed to read/write data to the upper part of the disk.

WORKAROUND

If you choose to use a large disk, you must make certain all *bootable* partitions exist *COMPLETELY* below the 137-GB boundary. The upper part of the disk may be used if it is used only for data and is accessed only from Windows.

Here’s a sample partition layout:

OS partition – 50 GB
Data partition – 200 GB

Adjust the OS and data partition sizes to suit your preferences, as long as you don’t push the far end of the OS partition beyond the 137-GB boundary. (Side note: if you redirect your MyDocs/MyMusic/MyPics folders to the data partition, you’re unlikely to ever need more than about 30-40 GB for XP’s OS partition, even with all your programs installed.)

Note that even though XP SP1/SP2/SP3 can support more than 137 GB, the *entire* OS partition must be completely within the first 137 GB. Remember, the first part of the boot process operates in Real Mode, so if any of the files it needs are stuck beyond 137 GB, booting will fail. The problem is that Windows is constantly rewriting and moving files around, so sooner or later something the boot process needs may migrate to the upper part of the OS partition, and when it does booting will fail if that upper part is out of reach of the bios driver. If the boot files stay within the first 137 GB, Windows may boot fine for weeks or even months, but then one day it will suddenly stop booting because one of the Real Mode files migrated out of reach. This confuses users because it worked before, so why did it suddenly stop working?

The solution is to keep the entire C: partition below 137 GB so nothing can ever migrate out of reach. Use the upper part of the disk only for a data partition.

In your case, I would pre-partition your new hard disk with one partition of about 50 GB (or anything less than about 130 GB) and another partition occupying the rest of the disk. Clone only the OS partition from the old disk and restore it to the first partition of the new disk. Don’t bother cloning the two Dell partitions–the Utility partition is non-essential anyway, and if you have a DellRestore partition it will be useless because of the bios limitation. After booting the newly transferred OS, use Windows Disk Management to NTFS quick-format the data partition, and then you can use Windows to start copying and storing files in that partition.

Remember, because of the bios limitation you must never use any DOS-based utilities with the combination of that computer and that hard disk. That includes Partition Magic and Ghost 2003. Even though those utilities pretend to have Windows front-ends, they are really DOS programs. Only let Windows (and true Windows programs) read or write to the upper part of the disk.

For anyone curious, try this: open a command-prompt window and type “dir c:1”. You’ll see a brief response that includes the VSN of that particular partition. (Aside: the “1” is just a way to avoid getting a long scrolling list of filenames. Assuming you don’t actually have a file named “1”, you’ll instead get “File not found.”)

Regardless of the ID, the software manufacturer should provide you with a new activation key for free, once you explained what happened. Microsoft does this with its own software, so why don’t other manufacturers do the same?

Disk-based copy-protection schemes are not uncommon in vertical market applications. I have a number of clients in the real estate, mortgage, and cpa industries, and occasionally come across industry proprietary apps that use schemes of this type.

At least in this industry, most software vendors don’t seem to be against giving you a new ID key — if they still support the software. But problems occur when the vendor has gone out of business, or has been bought out by another company, or has a new version out they want you to buy.

Does Windows generate a new ID every time a hard disk is formatted and if so, how do I find this ID ?
[…]
I have never come across this before as most activation, I believe, is tied to the network card MAC address.”

You format logical volumes (often referred to as partitions), not hard disks. You could be referring to either the DiskID or perhaps the Volume Serial Number, so we need to use the proper terminology to avoid confusion.

The “Volume Serial Number” is a pseudo-random string of four bytes in a partition’s boot record, meant to more or less uniquely identify a partition. The VSN has been around since the DOS era. Formatting a partition usually regenerates a new VSN. However, some “quick-format” tools will leave the PBR alone and simply zero the file system’s FATs or MFT, effectively erasing a partition without changing the VSN.

The “DiskID” is sometimes called the “NT Serial Number”, owing to the fact it was first introduced in Windows NT. It consists of four bytes in the hard disk’s MBR sector. Whereas the VSN is used to uniquely identify a partition, the purpose of the DiskID is to uniquely identify a hard disk so Windows can tell one hard disk from another. (Windows NT/2K and later uses a signature derived from this DiskID and the sector location of the partition on the disk to “remember” previously assigned drive letters when booting.) The Windows process of “initializing” a hard disk writes the first sector of the disk, including the MBR bootstrap code, the partition table, and generating a pseudo-random DiskID.

Wiping the MBR and reinitializing the hard disk writes a new DiskID for that hard disk. Reformatting a partition writes a new VSN for that partition, but not a new DiskID for the whole disk. However, installing/reinstalling Microsoft OS’s have a nasty habit of always rewriting the MBR and generating a new DiskID, whether it’s needed or not! So if you did more than just reformat and also reinstalled Windows, you would have ended up with both a new VSN and a new DiskID.

Note that this has nothing to do, per se, with activation. Activation is a separate issue, and programmers can design an activation scheme around whatever they want. Microsoft’s WPA activation scheme is based on a combination of hardware identifiers, including the network adapter’s MAC address, hard disk identifier (probably the DiskID), CPU, and more. Third-party software developers can base an activation scheme on some, none, or completely different identifiers.

It’s not clear from your post whether the software in question generates an ID based on the DiskID or on the VSN, but it sounds like it’s one or the other. Don’t let yourself get distracted by the identifiers Microsoft uses for WPA.

To protect yourself against disk-based activation or copy-protection schemes like this, it is possible to make a record of both the VSN and DiskID for later restoration. I believe there are a number of utilities around that can do that, though I’m old-school and prefer using a disk sector editor myself.