Replies

Dead link; try General Causes of STOP 0x0000007F Errors at:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…kb;en-us;137539%5B/url%5D

Your first order of business is to bulletproof yourself by grabbing an image of your drive. A Ghost boot disk does not require NTFS — Win98 will work fine for this purpose. Basically, it’s a plain old FAT32 boot floppy (format a: /s) with Ghost.exe (and I think Ghost.err) on it. You’re not using NTFS at all for Ghost, and Ghost is smart enough to handle NTFS — in fact, it’s doing a sector by sector copy and doesn’t care too much about what the disk contains.

If you have Norton SystemWorks 2003 installed on a running machine, look for Ghost Wizard and make a “Standard Ghost Boot Disk”. There’s Help there to explain your options. That may be what you need. If I read it right, you can even burn a bootable Ghost CD, but I’ve just used Win98 boot disks. Ghost.exe will fit on a single floppy – it’s about 600KB, as I recall.

The important thing whenever you’re nursing a sick machine is to image before you tinker. It makes a looming tragedy into a mere crisis and it takes a lot of the pressure off. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you can image back the original, and you’re no worse off than you are now — including the original problems.

What exactly is the error message you get when you try to boot? It’s not clear from earlier posts — I see an error message posted by somebody else, but is that exactly what you see?

Your first order of business is to bulletproof yourself by grabbing an image of your drive. A Ghost boot disk does not require NTFS — Win98 will work fine for this purpose. Basically, it’s a plain old FAT32 boot floppy (format a: /s) with Ghost.exe (and I think Ghost.err) on it. You’re not using NTFS at all for Ghost, and Ghost is smart enough to handle NTFS — in fact, it’s doing a sector by sector copy and doesn’t care too much about what the disk contains.

If you have Norton SystemWorks 2003 installed on a running machine, look for Ghost Wizard and make a “Standard Ghost Boot Disk”. There’s Help there to explain your options. That may be what you need. If I read it right, you can even burn a bootable Ghost CD, but I’ve just used Win98 boot disks. Ghost.exe will fit on a single floppy – it’s about 600KB, as I recall.

The important thing whenever you’re nursing a sick machine is to image before you tinker. It makes a looming tragedy into a mere crisis and it takes a lot of the pressure off. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you can image back the original, and you’re no worse off than you are now — including the original problems.

What exactly is the error message you get when you try to boot? It’s not clear from earlier posts — I see an error message posted by somebody else, but is that exactly what you see?

NOTE – THIS IS A FLIER: There’s a similar error with SP1 in XP (NOT 2000) that produces the same symptoms. I ran into this a week ago after installing SP-1. The gist of it was that if you’re running IDE drives with caching enabled, there’s a timing problem that can produce an “Unmountable boot volume – Stop 0x000000ED” error because of a corrupt boot.ini file. The solution was to boot from the CD, exit to “dos” and run CHKDSK /R. It ran a fairly long time, but fixed the problem. Here’s the reference at Microsoft’s KB: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…kb;en-us;315403, but Gateway also has an article about it.

Generally speaking, inferring the solution to a Windows 2000 problem from a glitch in XP is a pretty dumb thing to do, but there’s another reference to Win2000 that suggests they may indeed be related: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…kb;en-us;319011. Depending on the exact error message displayed, you might consider looking into this. First, XP and 2000 are pretty close under the covers. Second, installing new service packs is academic if you can’t boot. Third, CHKDSK /R ain’t gonna make things worse. Fourth, if it’s the same problem, neither Recovery Console or Last Known Good will work if it boot.ini is corrupt (at least it didn’t help me). I’d sure try this before I did anything drastic like reformatting.

One general suggestion before you start this kind of thing: grab an image of the drive (Symantec Ghost is what we use) BEFORE you start poking around. If you’ve got a Ghost image, you can relax a little bit and recover no matter what goes wrong with your recovery efforts. Otherwise, you’re tap dancing in a minefield. We keep a spare drive just for this purpose, but you can also Ghost to a server if you have the Enterprise version. The single user version of Ghost is included in Symantec’s Norton SystemWorks 2003 Professional Version. It’s saved our behinds more than once.

Interestingly enough, tech support from the manufacturer ( a major national brand – not Gateway) told this client to reformat her drive and start over, with no apparent concern over the fact that she had no backup at all. And they charged her $50 for the support. We got it all back and have a very happy new client (who is very receptive to discussions about the advantages of regular backups).

Your milage may vary. I guess the point of all this is that someone else on this forum may have run into the same issue and can pitch in and help here. As long as you grab a Ghost image before you go off exploring, you won’t hurt yourself.

NOTE – THIS IS A FLIER: There’s a similar error with SP1 in XP (NOT 2000) that produces the same symptoms. I ran into this a week ago after installing SP-1. The gist of it was that if you’re running IDE drives with caching enabled, there’s a timing problem that can produce an “Unmountable boot volume – Stop 0x000000ED” error because of a corrupt boot.ini file. The solution was to boot from the CD, exit to “dos” and run CHKDSK /R. It ran a fairly long time, but fixed the problem. Here’s the reference at Microsoft’s KB: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…kb;en-us;315403, but Gateway also has an article about it.

Generally speaking, inferring the solution to a Windows 2000 problem from a glitch in XP is a pretty dumb thing to do, but there’s another reference to Win2000 that suggests they may indeed be related: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…kb;en-us;319011. Depending on the exact error message displayed, you might consider looking into this. First, XP and 2000 are pretty close under the covers. Second, installing new service packs is academic if you can’t boot. Third, CHKDSK /R ain’t gonna make things worse. Fourth, if it’s the same problem, neither Recovery Console or Last Known Good will work if it boot.ini is corrupt (at least it didn’t help me). I’d sure try this before I did anything drastic like reformatting.

One general suggestion before you start this kind of thing: grab an image of the drive (Symantec Ghost is what we use) BEFORE you start poking around. If you’ve got a Ghost image, you can relax a little bit and recover no matter what goes wrong with your recovery efforts. Otherwise, you’re tap dancing in a minefield. We keep a spare drive just for this purpose, but you can also Ghost to a server if you have the Enterprise version. The single user version of Ghost is included in Symantec’s Norton SystemWorks 2003 Professional Version. It’s saved our behinds more than once.

Interestingly enough, tech support from the manufacturer ( a major national brand – not Gateway) told this client to reformat her drive and start over, with no apparent concern over the fact that she had no backup at all. And they charged her $50 for the support. We got it all back and have a very happy new client (who is very receptive to discussions about the advantages of regular backups).

Your milage may vary. I guess the point of all this is that someone else on this forum may have run into the same issue and can pitch in and help here. As long as you grab a Ghost image before you go off exploring, you won’t hurt yourself.

Point well taken, but there are a limited number of command line switches available. As I recall, I got this information here about a year ago.

A desktop shortcut to explorer can be used with command line arguments to open C: at root instead of My Documents by using this as a target:

%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /n, /e, C:

See 130510 at Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…&NoWebContent=1

Thanks. I’ll give it a try.

Thanks, Leif. I’ve seen this done in Java, which I think Frontpage can handle, and I’ve seen it done in Perl and on some of those online wizard-driven hosting services.

I was hoping for some sort of magic chunk of java or an activex control that would make an event calendar feasible in Frontpage. Wishful thinking, I guess.

Sure, can’t argue with that. You can always put back a copy of the mdb for debugging purposes.

You say you put front-end mdb’s containing source code in user hands? I don’t, unless it’s contractually a “for hire” project, and even then after user testing is done, everybody’s happy and the bill is paid. Until that happens, I keep the source and distribute the mde. I guess if you’re developing apps as an employee, it’s a different story, but it doesn’t seem wise if you’re a contractor.

Payment issues aside, distributing a front-end mdb is an open invitation to a lot of system types and beginners looking for code. Seems like you want to secure the application to rule out meddling, if for no other reason.

Anyway, happy holidays.

In addition to splitting the database, you might also distribute an MDE file, which contains no source code, to rule out accidental changes by users.

What you’re looking for is on the Quickbooks CD, I think. Here’s an excerpt from the Intuit link I gave you a couple of lines up:

/snip
Note: QuickBooks requires Microsoft

Edited by WyllyWylly to add URL code. See the Quick Guide.[/size]

The company, vendors, customers, etc. are local html files, although just to confuse the issue, they all have internet links to Intuit’s “EXTRA FEATURES!” (i.e., spam).

The core of it all is that you have to permit java to run, and you need an updated copy of Microsoft’s Virtual Machine, which is their flavor of java, as I understand it. See the bottom of http://www.quickbooks.com/support/faqs/qbw2001/200638.html%5B/url%5D. The solution they recommended worked for me a week ago. This one’s about 2001, which is the version I use, but I’d expect a similar comment for 2002.

HTH

I’ve been using and recommending Ad-Aware to our clients for about a year. I have yet to have a problem with it, and I doubt if suggestions that it impacts performance could be proven up. Ad-Aware is a simple program, with no agent stuff, and it doesn’t run as a service or a TSR. It can’t have any impact on performance if it’s not running.

Something to consider, however, is the impact of all that spyware crap on performance. I recently ran Ad-Aware on a particularly dirty machine that registered 275 hits in Ad-Aware, most of which he wouldn’t have wanted his mom to know about. Natch, it was a college kid’s machine, and it also had four viruses and just about every music sharing program that has ever seen the light of day. Plus a failing NIC and a bad CD-ROM drive. A total mess…

Give it a try — they have a “Double Your Money Back” guarantee. ;-]

Take a look at Q315191 at Microsoft’s Knowledgebase. It sounds like you can use Group Policy Manager to do this, but I haven’t explored it further. I would surmise that your drives would need to be NTFS formatted versus FAT32. The article corrects a documentation error and tells you how to overcome a couple of problems, like being able to display folders in Explorer, how to hide the drive completely, and how to block DIR commands from a Cmd prompt.

Sounds like you ought to be able to do this.

I saw a similar article in the Ping newsletter and I think CNet as well.

I’m not sorry to see the idea flame out. Like many of Microsoft’s recent licensing schemes, it appears to have more to do with extracting more revenue than delivering a better product. Only Microsoft would think of charging corporate customers for NOT upgrading, and only Microsoft could get away with it. And only Microsoft would charge academic licensing customers for machines that don’t use Microsoft products – like Macs and Linux machines. Only Microsoft would triple the price of their product in a down market (e.g., Win98 upgrade versus XP Pro upgrade).

I probably should bite my tongue for saying this, but it seems to me that It would be nice if MS put some of their ferocious intellect into their products instead of into their Licensing Schemes Division. I sure don’t want to start some sort of flame war. Mind you, I’m one of their fans — I LIKE Microsoft products. But when the operating system costs more than the hardware itself, somethin’ ain’t right.