PeterPeter

Thanks boxturt, glad to be here.

Well it is going to be up to around 45Degrees Celsius today here in Sydney Australia, 38 on the coast and we have three different fire fronts raging in the forests in three different states. We would love some of the rain from the Northern Hemisphere here. New South Wales is currently listed as 99% drought across the state and others aren't fairing that much better except in the tropics and Tasmania. Currently bread, milk and meat are all on the rise, due to lack of water and feed. So be careful what you ask for, with global warming you might just get the opposites happening as we have been the last 10 yrs. Would love some RAIN.

Thanks Carl.

Actually haveing a read in a quite room is recommended by Sleep Therapists and Sleep Units but not the others as Andy has said. Having a warm glass of milk is said to have calming sleeping effects as well. Generally don't drink coffee about 8 hrs before going to sleep, alcohol can be a stimilant too, although in small doses like a I AM A SPAMMER of scotch can help to get to dreamland. It is always difficult to sleep in hours outside the norm, like during the day as the bodies natural clock does play a big part in telling the head when to go to sleep and wake up. So you are fighting that as well. I have done many months of working nights and sleeping during the day, and it can be difficult and disorientating as well. Just try to keep to a routine is a big key. I do have a health background and friends in the sleep disorders industry so have discussed this at length with them. Hope that helps.

Diamonds

Thanks Tom.

you

http://www.alleycode.com/ this is one I found recently that is fairly straight forward as well. Alos free.

I agree with you Carbonize, but then there are those that like to stretch the envelope.

lose

Hell

So you are back at XP then, which is what you wanted to get to eventually. I did realise you wanted to format and clean install, it was the problem of getting there that seems to be in the grey area a bit. Still it is there and up and running which is good.

That was what I thought but his post implies that he can't boot into DOS. Let's wait and see where he is at, haven't had any info back from him, since 11am US time by the looks of it and it iw somthing like 11.20pm there now.

My thoughts as well, but I get the impression he isn't able to boot into Dos either from his original and other posts. Hence trying to get him a boot disk as you had originally suggested. Would seem that his system won't let him get into Safe Mode and he has no other way to go but formating and reinstalling. But again without a boot strap he won't get there either with upgrade CD's as he has indicated above. A bit like the horse chasing the cart. And your last line is few sentences are when I think he is currently heading.

No you are right Madmanmcp, but my feeling is he wants to format the drive. So if that is the case, my suggestion is to fdisk it, reset the partitioning etc and then he will be back to square one to format the drive. Formating the drive while in NTFS might not get him there, in my experience, getting it back to fdisk and then going through the process of formatting it and reinstalling it, seems to reset things better than just formating a disk after this sort of experience. But everyone has different ways of getting to the same point in time. Reason I mention it this way is, recently I rebuilt a machine from spares to have a go at installing a Linux suite and forgot I had the disk at NTFS, so after going through this sort of problem I had to end up doing exactly as I have suggested but confused the Fat on the drive making it think it was a different sized drive. Had to hook it up to another motherboard to get the drive recognised correctly to be able to reformat it correctly and use back in the older machine and older motherboard. I'm no more and no less an expert than you are. Trying to read other peoples minds off of forums is hard to do, so we are both trying to accomplish the same thing. You know what your talking about, I can see that in the posts you have made.

Can you boot off of Windows 90SE If you can, when it is booting up, hold down the f10 or f8 can't remember which one. Should give you a list of options. You need to boot into dos, but you will also need to be able to access fdisk to reformat the hard drive. From memory Windows 98 came with a boot floppy 3 1/2" disk which should have fdisk on it. When you get into Dos you type fdisk and follow the menu items. Keep in mind that fat32 drives larger than 2G were around. You need to be careful you don't confuse the fat table and boot strap of the drive. Otherwise you will chase your tail around trying to get the hard drive back to what you want. or use the following http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...55-BD5AFEE126D8 or this as well h_tp://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm

moogie The answer is in this post towards the bottom http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/i...?showtopic=5451

Still won't be able to install Windows from an update CD as it checks to see if another version of Windows in the upgrade path is installed. Remember I said you could boot off the CD to do a repair install of Windows XP. In your cmos when you restart the computer press delete key should take you to your cmos setup. In there under the second heading on the left usually, you can tell the computer of the boot sequence. Like CD or Hard Drive or Floppy or something else. Change it to boot 1st of CD and change the other sequences to not have anything so disabled. This way it will boot off of the CD. Try that before reformatting the hard drive. In case there is data you need off the drive. But a fresh install is a good thing too cleans up the mess.

Thanks Alex, good to be helping out.

Thanks one and all.

If you use Joomla remember there is an iminent update to version 1.5 comming which apparently might not be easy to upgrade to. I certainly would suggest Joomla and there are many themes out there for it. The new version looks good in Beta and might be a lot easier to maintain once the bugs are out of it. It has cleaner code as well and is supposedly easier to get around in as well.

This story from the beginnings with the Featureprice debarcile is similar to mine. Thank God for Bill the team and TCH at the time and since as well.