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windows 7 installation via USB

I had asked the tech guys to setup 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise and after a day and half of setting up windows I’m excited to see what this baby can do. It works fine for 3 hours till I leave the office. Once I’m home, I decide to finish all my pending tasks and connect to the office. But the laptop refuses to boot up!!! Damn windows!!! It just gives me a “BOOTMGR failed to Load” error all the time.

Next day I find out that we don’t have the bootable DVD’s for Windows 7. Why? Seems volume licensing is only for upgrades!!! Then, how was it installed? Seems it took a day and half to install caz they did it off some network share. So what do we do now? Can we get a DVD? After searching for ages on the Microsoft site, we find the Windows 7 Enterprise DVD hidden at the bottom of the downloads page. But the damn thing won’t download. Aaaargh!!!

Ok, now its another day and half and my laptop is still not up and running! I start checking on the net and this seems to be a pretty common problem. Time to take things into my own hands. After some digging around, I decide to make a bootable Windows 7 Enterprise installation USB disk. The reason is that the tool that fixes the BOOTMGR error lies on that installation disk. A fairly simple process actually!!!

All you need is

4GB USB stick
Any bootable Windows 7 or Vista DVD (XP may work too)
A dump of the correct Windows 7 installation disk
Access to another computer with Windows 7 or Vista
Step 1: Format your USB disk.

Open a command prompt as an administrator and type in “diskpart”.

Then type in “list disk”. This will display a list of all drive. Take note of your USB drive number. Then type the following:

select disk 1 (assuming 1 is your disk number)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS (this could take some time)
assign
exit

Step 2: Make it bootable

Put a bootable Windows 7 or Vista DVD into the disk drive and change to the “boot” folder. Then type in “bootsect /nt60 h:” (assuming h: is the drive letter of your usb disk)

Step 3: Copy the required installation files to the usb drive.

That’s all! Now reboot your machine and make sure it boots from usb. Once it boots, click “Next” and then select the “Repair your Computer” option at the bottom. Select your installation, then hit “next”. Then select “Startup repair”.

This worked immediately for me and the laptop is finally up and running. I gotta lot of work to catch up with now! Cool

My Health Log · My Health Log in Life with 0 comments on Fri Nov 13, 2009 10:06 pm

I need to create a health log and keep track of my health.
I've heard of fitlink.com, but I wanted a small portion of my blog to be able to do it.
If anyone has any ideas out there, let me know. In the mean time, I'll try it out as well.

Avoiding the void · Avoiding the void in Life with 0 comments on Sat Oct 17, 2009 5:19 pm

We talk a lot about simplifying your life on Zen Habits, from simplifying your possessions and clutter to simplifying the stuff you need to do. But recently a reader who mentioned that the problem is that he doesn't know what to do with himself after cutting out television and other time-wasters from his life.

The simple answer: Do what you love.

His comment, while understandable, illustrates a common misunderstanding of simplification, and its a good point that I thought is worth discussing. The misunderstanding: that simplifying is basically just cutting stuff out, leaving an emptiness or void. People think that it leaves you with a boring life, and nothing fun. They couldnt be more wrong.

The real goal of simplifying, and the First Rule, is to first identify what is essential, what you love, what is important to you,and then cut out all the rest that distracts you and keeps you from doing whats important.

We have so much stuff in our lives, from possessions to things we need to do to information coming in to visual and emotional clutter, that we are overloaded. The result? We end up doing a lot of things that arent really important to us, because we have so much other stuff to do that has crept into our lives and that we leave in our lives, unexamined.

Socrates said, "he unexamined life is not worth living."Well, Socrates must have been an excellent simplifier,as evidenced by the fact that he just wore a robe and sandals. In any case, in order to simplify our lives, we must first examine our lives. What is important, and do all the things in our lives give us value? These are the questions to ask, and if you find the answers, simplifying is extremely easy.

Lets look at how finding what is essential, what we love, and what is important to us, can help us simplify, and what it leaves in our lives:

1. The first question: What is most important to me? What do I love to do? The answer is different to every person. It may be hiking or mountain biking or creating music or anything, really. Answer this question first.

2. The second question: what are the things going on in my life, the things I do every day and every week and month, and how are they related to what is important to me? If you are going out drinking with the guys, and its not really important to you, and its stopping you from doing what is important, thats a candidate for simplifying. Examine all your commitments, and ask yourself if they are really important to you, if they give you great value for your time, and if they are related to what is truly important.

3. Possessions: The same questions can be asked of all the stuff you own,do you really love them? Are they truly essential? Another question you can ask, to clarify your thinking: If my house burned down, which few things would I want to replace? Get rid of all the rest. They leave clutter and stress and keep you from enjoying the stuff you really love.

4. Everything else: This same concept can be applied to anything else in your life, your work, the information you read every day, the television programs you watch, the people in your life. Know whats essential, what you love, whats important, and get rid of the rest.

5. What you're left with: If you get rid of the extraneous stuff, the stuff thats not related to whats important to you, what do you have left? Just the important stuff. Just the stuff you really love to do. When you get rid of the other stuff, when you cut, lets say, television and hours of Internet surfing and beer drinking from your life, dont just cut it out, remember whats important and what you love to do, and do that instead. For me, that means spending time with my family instead of working, that means writing or reading instead of watching TV, that means helping others instead of going to the mall (something I want to do more of).
Simplifying isnt meant to leave your life empty, its meant to leave space in your life for what you really want to do. Know what those things are before you start simplifying.

girl next door · girl next door in Life with 1 comments on Wed Oct 07, 2009 1:16 pm

I have this neighbor who is an Air hostess for an airlines in Kuwait called Jazeera Airlines. She is quite lovely, really.
But about 8 months ago, while vacationing in Mumbai, India, the story goes that she and her friend were going out and she said that they would take a rickshaw, but her friend suggested that they take the bike, and my friend sat pillion.
On the way, a rickshaw crashed into them, throwing my friend on the pavement, where she hit her head badly. Crying or Very sad

She was admitted to hospital, due to internal bleeding in the brain. She was in ICU for about a week, after which she was still in hospital for recovery and physiotherapy.
But a part of her skull was not put back due to swelling. She could not talk, but she understands mostly everything, and she responds by making sign language. Now she can write things as well.
Its sad to know your friend going through this.
I saw her a few days ago, and she is still lovely, but cant move her right hand and there is pain in her right leg. Shocked

She will undergo operation in a few days, to put back the skull cap, after which she will continue physiotherapy to try and get her to be as much as she can be.

I wish her all the best and pray for her speedy recovery, and if you get ot read this, please pray for her as well. Crying or Very sad

Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs

Has anyone heard of this - Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs?

Its not well known in the Microsoft Licensing community as well (locally in middle east).

Its basically an operating system for old PC's, based on XP, with only the barebones essentials.

Microsoft Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (WinFLP) is a Windows-based operating system designed for enterprise customers with legacy PCs who are not in a position to purchase new hardware. WinFLP provides the same security and manageability as Microsoft Windows XP SP2 while providing a smooth migration path to the latest hardware and operating system.

Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (WinFLP) requires:

A minimum of 611 MB of free hard drive space. Actual requirements will vary based on your system configuration and the applications and features you choose to install. Installing all optional components requires 1151 MB of disk space. These requirements are reported on the screen as you select options in the Setup wizard. Additional hard disk space may be required if you are installing over a network. Also, you should reserve additional space for future updates and service packs.

A computer with 233 megahertz or higher processor clock speed (300 MHz is recommended); Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor is recommended.

64 MB of RAM. 256 MB of RAM is recommended.

More info in wikipedia.org, but I already use legacy pc's and used it with winlite, and it runs fast anyways.