Denver Colorado Blog

Install Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 7 from a USB Jumpdrive
by FrosT

Disclaimer
I am in no way responsible for losing data, corrupting jumpdrives or harddrives due to you choosing to follow this tutorial. Do any and all of these actions at your own risk with understanding it may do damage to your data, as such you should backup all of your data before proceeding. I have done this myself and it worked great. Remember that Windows 7 is a BETA release and if you do not already have it I cannot help you in finding it. Same goes with XP and Vista, if you do not have a valid/legal copy of either I cannot help you find one, so do not ask. Thank you.

Introduction
For those who do not know, I am an IT Professional. As such my job demands me to re-image computers on a regular basis. For the most part I just use a premade universal image. This works great, but every now and then I need to install Windows XP, Vista or 7 (testing purposes) on a machine without all the crazyness of an image (policies and what not). Since I have never been a "good" cd keeper, almost all my CD's/DVD's are trashed within the first 5 uses. As such I decided to go out and buy an 8 GB Jumpdrive to try and find a way to fit all three of those operating systems on to one medium and not have to carry 3 CD's/DVD's around. Due to this I spent about 5 hours reading through tutorials on WinPE 2.0 and BartPE. Well since BartPE does not allow you to install Windows 7 (not sure on Vista) that was not the option for me. As such I set out to install WinPE 2.0 on a jumpdrive.

Well this went relatively seamless, except for the fact that I do not use Windows Vista on any of my computers and I really did not want to setup a machine with Vista just for creating this jumpdrive to install all 3 operating systems. Instead I found an alternative usage to the Diskpart program that is recommended. The reason the Diskpart program would not work is under Windows XP it does not show removable storage as being a disk to list. In Vista, removable storage devices are shown, and if you use Vista, the tutorials you can find on google will work just fine to setup the jumpdrive to be bootable. If that is the case, you can simply skip over this part of the tutorial.

Preparation
First up, we need to take the jumpdrive (for just one OS you can use a 4GB, for more than one an 8GB is needed) and make it bootable. The easiest way to do this is with the HP Boot Utility. I do not have a direct download to it, but you should find it somewhere on Google. After you have that utility you need the Windows 98 SE Boot disk which can be found also on Google. If you do not have a floppy drive, which I take is very likely to not have one, we need a way to "mount" a floppy disk. Luckily there is a utility for that as well! Download the Virtual Floppy Drive software. Now once you have those files and installed the Virtual Floppy Drive and the HP Bootable USB utility we need to mount the Windows 98 SE Boot disk to a virtual floppy. Finally we will need Bootsect so we can change the boot sector later on to use a newer version.

Mounting Windows 98 SE to Virtual Floppy Drive
Open up the VFD program and click Start, I do not recommend installing it as a service unless you want to continue using it. Next click on the Disk 0 and click “Create“ (I think it is create) and make sure it is set on 1.44 MB 3.5“ and click ok. Now you should have A:\ show up in Windows Explorer (unless you set it to be something different). Let's open up the boot98se.exe and click ok and it should extract the files to the floppy. Great, we have the files on a virtual floppy drive, let's open up the HP USB Bootable Utility. Once that is open we want to format the drive as Fat32 and click on the “Dos Startup Disk“ or whatever that checkbox says. Browse to your Virtual Floppy Drive and use that.

NOTE: THIS WILL WIPE ALL DATA FROM YOUR JUMPDRIVE. BACK IT UP OR LOSE IT, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST DATA.

I generally check the "Quick Format" but you can do it how you want. Make sure the right jumpdrive is selected, if it is not select it. Once you are sure click the “Start“ button to format the jumpdrive and make it bootable. We are nearly done, we now just have to go into a Command prompt (Start > Run > cmd) and locate the bootsect.exe and run "bootsect.exe /nt60 E: /f" Where E: is the drive letter of your jumdrive. It should change the boot sector to use the updated version (bootmgr) file.
Now we are onto to the WinPE 2.0

Getting Win PE 2.0
Well since I cannot write this tutorial better myself, I will direct you to the tutorial I used to get a valid copy of Win PE 2.0. Remember, do not do the Diskpart potion if you are on XP and followed the above steps. The best tutorial that helped me out was the one from Svrops.com. You can find the tutorial at Svrops WinPE 2.0 Tutorial. This tutorial will show you how to add features to Win PE 2.0 etc. When you get to the part about making the ISO, which is not necessary. However, copying the winpe.wim to the /sources is important and renaming it to boot.wim. Now we simply need to copy everything located at C:\winpe\iso to your jumpdrive's root directory. (C:\ being the name of where you put winpe). Once you have it copied, you now have a bootable version of WinPE 2.0 on a jumpdrive. Now it is time to copy the windows file. I made separate directories for each version of windows (WinVista, WinXP, Win7) and copy the CD files straight to that. If it is in .iso format, mount the ISO and copy the files that way or burn the .iso to a CD/DVD then copy it. We need all the files from each CD/DVD or Image in the folder. Once that has been done, you now have all 3 operating systems on one bootable jumpdrive. Let's boot into WinPE 2.0 on a system you would like to install one of the three operating systems.

Booting up Into WinPE 2.0
Since I am not familiar with all BIOS and computer setups I would suggest, if you do not know how to boot to USB, googling how to for your system. There should be plenty of those out there. I will not waste time answering questions about how to do that, so do not ask. Booting into WinPE 2.0 will take a few minutes. The command prompt you initially see may look like it is "hanging" on winpeinit (or something similar) if so, just be patient. After 1 or 2 minutes it should pop up a new line you can type on. From here, I am not sure if the jumpdrive was mounted for me before or not. To check, try just typing in E:\ or D:\ depending on how many partitions/drives are on that computer it may be one of those or further down. You know the system better than I do. So try those first. After each one do a DIR if you see your WinXP, WinVista, Win7 folders in the directory listing then that is the drive and you can simply cd to whatever version you want and run setup.exe. And it is as simple as that.

However, if that did not work correct for you, at the command prompt type diskpart. Do a list disk and see if your jumpdrive is there (look at the size to verify) if it is do a SEL DISK X (where X is the number the jumpdrive is listed as for me it was 1). From there do AUTOMOUNT. This should mount the drive. So exit out of the diskpart and go through the process above until you locate the jumpdrive. Switch the windows version you want to install and install it.

Editor's Note:
After I tried installing WinXP using this method I found that you need to run the following command to install Windows XP and not the executable:

D:\os\WinXP\i386\winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource.

Make sure D: is your jumpdrive's letter and \os\WinXP\ is where i have my XP extracted to, so modify that to be what you put it as.
Also Make sure you replace C: with the drive you want to install Windows to. (I would also verify that the drive is mounted with DISKPART before running the above).

After that is done running, remove your Jumpdrive and reboot and it should load into the Windows Installation.

Ending Notes
This process worked great for me, if it does not work for you, well I am sorry. There are just too many variables that it can go wrong. So please ask questions, but first do your own research. I will not take time to help someone who did not bother helping themselves. If you find an error or an issue with this tutorial please feel free to comment and let me know and I will look into correcting it.

Thanks for reading.

Attempting to Adopt a Dog in Colorado
by FrosT

Introduction
Well my wife and I have been attempting to find a dog to adopt in Colorado. We have been actively trying for a couple months and have had some good and bad experiences. Particularly the bad experiences come from one company, Colorado FurBabies. Well here is the full story that will hopefully help you avoid the same issues we had.

Finding a dog
We have been looking and thinking about a dog for some time and decided to actually contact a place to see if we could meet a dog. First off we had to submit an application. The applications they make you fill out are somewhat of a joke if you ask me. I am sure there are good reasons for it, such as making sure that the home can become permanent for a dog and the person applying fully realizes what they are getting into. More of the joke, for the Colorado Furbabies, it took about 1-2 week lag time for our application to go through. Then after it went through a house inspection was needed, which took another 3 days or so. This was not "horrible" but because of this process we were unable to adopt or even visit/meet a few great looking dogs that we were heavily interested in. This was very disappointing to us.

So after we found out that the dogs we wanted to meet were no longer available we looked up other dogs and let them know of the one we did want to meet. Granted, this dog did not stick out as "we want this dog" like the other ones had, but we were willing to meet with it and see for ourselves if that dog would work out. Which brings us to the next problem.

Trying to get a Visit
Now, I heavily understand that personal issues take precedent over anything else. We contacted the foster person to get a viewing. They stated that they would email us, 4 days later no email. So we called them attempting to setup a viewing for that night. They stated they would email us the address. Well 4 hours later no email, and it was about 9:00 at night and I do have to work in the morning and they were about 45 minutes away. So that would put us home well past 11 o'clock. Not acceptable in my terms. They should have emailed us like the agreement.

Then they had to go out of town for the personal issues and as such delayed the viewing again. A couple days later we scheduled a viewing where we would drive out the 45 minutes to meet the dog. When we get there no one is home. We waited around for about an hour to find out that the dogs got loose, which we understand can happen. Since they still had not found the dogs we did not feel like waiting around anymore and left for home (a 3 hour trip for nothing). Again, I know things happen that are out of our control.

Finally, the next day, the foster person drives the dog over to our house. When they get there we do like the dog, but the dog is younger than was advertised. We did not really care to have more or less a "puppy", which this dog was obviously still in (pretty heavily) the puppy stages. (Maybe if they would provide a closer estimate of age we would not have even asked to see the dog). We let her know that we need to think about it, because even though the dog was still younger, we might want to adopt it. After some heavy discussion over the next couple days we decided that the dog was not for us and let them know...

The Aftermath
The next day we get a nasty email from a person who works at the Colorado Furbabies. In essence they basically thanked us for wasting the dogs time and that it was our fault for not taking the dog. Hold on here...how is this our fault again? Because your foster holders are incompetent of contact us back on a timely basis? It was not our fault it took them 4 days to get a hold of us for a visit and then failed to email us essential items. And then we took our time to drive out there to have the dog gone missing...and this is our problem. No way. Screw you.

Given that email from the person, I would highly suggest that you do not even attempt to adopt a dog from the Colorado Furbabies association. They are very unprofessional, unreliable and they blame you for not taking a dog that you do not want because they were incompetent of getting you a viewing time in a timely fashion. Through this experience alone, I do not know if I will adopt a dog again. These people want to help dogs and yet blame you for their own problems of not being able to run an adoption agency, as I see properly. By also making you wait 2 weeks to know if you get accepted, then it being up to the foster person to contact you, who may or may not fall through the deal depending on how reliable they are. This is just unacceptable in my books.

Ending Notes
Feel free to try and adopt a dog through the Colorado Furbabies, hopefully your experiences are better than ours were. As for me, I am fed up with this bull shit they pull you through. From the time it takes to know that you can even adopt a dog to actually meeting the dog was just a pain in the ass. I would not have posted this blog, if the volunteer or worker had not sent us that nasty email and worded it like she did. There is no reason for a professional company to send an email like that. Personally blaming us for their problems is just ridiculous. Well I hope I can save you from a bad experience. As for me, I would rather go to a breeder instead of adopting a dog because of this experience. Thanks to Colorado Furbabies, I will now no longer make my efforts to adopt a dog and help with the dog over population. Thank you.

As a side note, I do not necessarily blame the foster person, as they had some personal issues going on. I do however blame the main contact of Colorado Furbabies, for blaming us for holding the dog up, when we never asked for the dog to be held, and we could not get a viewing due to lack of communication from the foster holder.

Related Entry:
Do NOT Adopt from Colorado Furbabies

EMovies Will No Longer be Supported
by FrosT

Well it has been a long ride for EMovies, which was first developed for better Search Engine Optimization for my sites. However, Yahoo has changed their whole site design and instead of re-coding EMovies I am canning the project. This is mostly due to lack of support. It is extremely sad how people will just use software, which I was giving free help to many people via email, and in return offer you nothing, not even a small donation.

Well this is dis-heartening to me, but with as much time as it would take to fix the EMovies and without any support or funding, I am not going to continue this project. Maybe one day I will be bored and re-make it for the new Yahoo Movies, but that is very unlikely.

Thank you for understanding. Have a great day.

Related:
Add Free Movie Listing Reviews to your Website

MySQL Database Backup .MYI and .MYD

Introduction
Hello everyone!

Long time no post, I know. Well really I have been busy with work, a wife and a new baby being on the way. Well anyways, this article is about how to restore a backup to MySQL from a .MYI and .MYD file that you may have. Our dedicated host backs up only these files and does not use the mysqldump utility to create a full SQL backup of our database. This is fine, but makes a bit extra work. So let us get started.

Determine Your Version
First we need to determine the version of your server's MySQL database. Mine was 3.23, old I know. I do not know if you can mix and match .MYD files so I just downloaded that and installed it on my local computer. I would suggest doing the same, this way you are messing with copies of the actual database instead of the real thing.

Creating a Database
Now we want to go into the MySQL console on your computer and create a new database, this database name can be anything. For this tutorial sake I will use "backup". Now that you have created a database "backup" it is time to get the table structure from your current database. The table structure is necessary for this process, if you do not know or do not have it, I am not sure if this will work for you. Try anyway you can.

Lucky for me, I was just trying to get a user's data back whose entries were accidentally deleted. So I had my full table structure online and just did a phpMyAdmin Export of the table structure and ran that through my personal computers MySQL command line tool. This creates 3 files inside of c:\mysql\data\backup a .frm, .myi and .myd. This is exactly what we want!

Restoring the Actual Files
Now what we are able to do is copy only the .MYI and .MYD files from your backup and paste them into the c:\mysql\data\backup directory overwriting any files that are in there. This will basically put our data into those tables.

To test that the data was input successfully, open the MySQL command line tool and use the database "backup" and do a "select * from `yourtablenamehere` LIMIT 1" If no results are returned then it did not work, try restarting your MySQL server and then try again, this generally works. If not, then post a comment and I will try and help you out.

If that worked, you now have a working backup of your database! Now to export this data.

Export the Backup Data
Exporting the data is rather easy. Just use the mysqldump tool and run a command like this to get all that data into a SQL statement you can import into your current DB via phpMyAdmin:

mysqldump -uroot desk yourtablenamehere > yourtablename.sql

This is assuming the user is root with no password (the reason I do not set a password was this is strictly on my localhost and I have a firewall setup to block all external connections to MySQL). You can replace any of that with the user information you use. That should now create a file yourtablename.sql with all of the SQL. This may have a create table at the top of the file, so manually edit the file and remove that portion to avoid any errors when trying to import via phpMyAdmin.

Now just copy that text file or upload it to your phpMyAdmin and that data should be re-inserted and you are up and running again!

Ending Notes
This tutorial was made to backup minimal data for a user, what I really did was ran a sql command to only pull at that user data and create a new able with it. To do that also just do this:

create table yourtablenamebup SELECT * FROM yourtablename WHERE conidtion=something

Then you can just do a dump of that table and have just the information you need and not every information!

This tutorial is meant as a reference, be sure to backup all data before attempting it as I am not responsible for any lost/corrupted data for mis-use or use of this tutorial. This tutorial as worked for me many times in the past following those instructions.

Please use at your own risk!

Tips to Avoid Spyware and Virus's

Introduction
The past weekend I was working on a friends computer and he wondered how and what I use to avoid getting spyware and virus's. I laughed at the question and while trying to think of the words to explain how I avoid getting spyware and virus's I simply said, "I know what not to download". And as ludicrous as it may sound spyware, 90% of the time is initiated by users. The other 10% is not having up-to-date software, such as Internet Explorer. Which prompted me to write this exert on how to avoid downloading and installing spyware, and virus's on your on computer not knowing, so let's get to it!

Pay Attention and Read
The biggest problem is that most people do not bother to read the fine print, which is where a lot of companies can get you. Taking the extra 30 seconds to read the fine print can save you hours and hundreds of dollars (which would be spent fixing the computer). First off let's look at a legitimate download, which everyone needs in this day and age, Acrobat Reader. As much as it sucks, Adobe tends to bundle software with their application. Although it is not Spyware, what they bundle will slow down your computer with unnecessary software. The Photo Album is not something everyone needs or wants, especially when for most people the default windows picture viewer is plenty. But yet when you download Adobe Reader, the default check mark is set to download Photo Album with Adobe Reader. Why? Because Adobe knows that most users are not computer savy and will not un-check it thus making their name bigger and make you feel like you NEED Adobe software to do anything.

Another company that will bundle software by default is Yahoo!. Anytime you download a game, or software from Yahoo! They bundle their crappy Yahoo! Toolbar. Which I have seen slows systems down up to 30% and most users do not even know how the toolbar came to be on their system. All they had to do was un-check one simple box, which of course is somewhat hidden and not noticeable because Yahoo! Wants you to depend on their software. In the end, companies are deceitful because they want money. Simple as that, so do yourself the favor and read and know what you are installing. It will save you numerous headaches.

Keep Windows Up-to-Date
As much as I do not like Windows Update (slow, and very inefficient) keeping windows software up-to-date will help you prevent spyware and viruses. Reason being is exploits are found every day in Windows software which could allow someone to inject spyware to your computer through a website, email or another means without you even realizing it. The big one is Internet Explorer, I highly suggest moving over to Firefox. That is my personal preference and have not had one issue with spyware leaking through like I have had with Internet Explorer. Keeping windows up-to-date is key to fighting spyware and viruses especially since there are many people who dislike windows and intentionally try to exploit it to disrupt it's users.

Do not download Freeware
Freeware online is often times bundled with Spyware galore! If you want to download free software make sure it is from a trusted source, such as Download.com, who regularly checks software on their website for spyware. No matter what avoid downloading any type of screen savers. As cool as some maybe, those .scr files are opening for massive invasion of privacy and attacks. The worst software to download is Screensavers so avoid it at all costs. Again anything you do download be wise and conscious about what the software is and how necessary the software is.

Keep Firewalls Active
Now a days with Cable and DSL a lot of people have Routers, if you do not I highly suggest getting one, as they come with a Hardware firewall, which ultimately protects you more than any software firewall could even dream about without taking up your computer's resources. A lot of your probably remember a few worms a while back that hit a ton of computers, Code Red I think was a huge one for DSL customers. When this worm hit the only really protected computers where those that had a hardware firewall in place to block certain ports which the worm infiltrated on. There are always worms circulation through the internet that attach to computers who do not have the port or an update to fix the worm blocked.

I have Spyware!! Help!
Once you have reached the stage that your computer is infected with Spyware, you have two choices. First choice is to download my favorite program, Spybot Search and Destroy. I have used this program for many years and if the spyware can be removed without a format this program will do it. Your second choice, which most people do not like, is a clean format. Basically wipes all of your software off and restarts you from ground zero. Personally I format my computer every 3-6months whether my computer is infected or not. But for the average user that is not viable. I would suggest that your computer is formatted every 1 to 2 years. Just to keep it running smooth and clean. When the computer is formatted you know that it is spyware, virus and any type of malware free.

Ending Notes
In the end avoiding Spyware, Malware, Worms and Virus's does not require some high priced virus or spyware checker. All it requires is a little work and a little time to make sure you are downloading and installing software you want and making sure it is not infected or bundled. I have not ran any anti-virus or anti-spyware software on my computer since 2000 and the only time I get infected, is when I consciously realize that I downloaded something I should not have. Luckily I have multiple harddrives and I always make sure that my main Windows Drive has nothing important on it so I can format it without worrying about losing any personal or important data. Well I hope this will help you to avoid Spyware and Virus's and keep your system running clean and smooth for years to come!

Related Articles
Spyware Tips for Avoiding and Removing
(Note I know the two are very similar but it does not hurt to re-iterate from time to time)