Last major collection of links. Alvis has a TAKS test tomorrow so we are going retro and watching some Azumanga Daioh anime DVD’s to melt our brain cells before heading off to an early bedtime. I’ll try to section it up a bit. Lots of neat finds and worthy candidates for your attention.  Do...

Previously posted in this series: Partition and Disk Management: Part I – Dancing with Diskpart Partition and Disk Management: Part II – Free and Useful Tools  Partition and Disk Management: Part III – Pesky Dell Partitions It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was making this post: Secu...

Nothing like a real-world challenge to lead me to burn through a few hours of research and followup. It all started with this post by Dwight Silverman over at the Tech Blog: Anarchy, indeed: Help recover files from a crashed drive Long story short, a business system crashed, some system recovery was...

Hang on. This may be a doozie. It will (hopefully) wrap up this project. Summary The purpose of this ongoing project is to build a Win PE 2.0 based boot-disk, that has a great VistaPE GUI interface (instead of the standard CLI shell) and the PGP WDE drivers injected so we can “liveCD-boot� a PGP...

Yes, I know that Windows 7 Beta got released last week. I had tried valiantly this past Friday to get my W7 Beta key and W7 ISO downloads. The key was a complete wash until Saturday when the floodgates opened and I was able to get several along with a quick download of the ISO file. I had been worri...

This will be the first of a series of posts that I really have wanted to compose so badly I’ve been avoiding it like The Plague. It’s not that I don’t want to share the information and tips/tricks I have learned by myself and from others. It’s that I’m still having a very difficult time de...

I’ve been slipstreaming XP setup disks since SP1 was released. There are a lot of third-party tools to help make the process painless, but in the end, I always come back to the basic method outlined by Paul Thurrott in his Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3) guide (and previous vers...

Yes, October is behind us and the pumpkins are being ground up for pie. However, I really scored a few awesome finds on the Net this week while I was continuing my hunt for a solution to my PE 2.0/Vista project headaches. Alas, despite a plea for assistance in loading a preferred driver in VistaPE o...

Rain is coming down pretty heavy here on the Texas Gulf Coast. I had the day off in remembrance of Veteran’s Day.  I met my Dad last night in Houston and took him out for dinner at a local bar-b-que joint. My treat as he is a Vietnam vet and it seemed like as good an excuse as any for trying ...

Important for Sysadmins: Sysprep Updated and Changed for XP SP3! This is critical info for all you system administrators who use Microsoft Sysprep to prepare a system before imaging and deployment. Updated Sysprep.exe now available for Windows XP SP3 « the back room tech Back Room Tech guru Julie p...