Free Acronis Software from Seagate

Today I installed my new Seagate harddrive. It's a SATA drive with 500GB which substitutes my old EIDE drive with 160GB.
I want to migrate all my data including OS to the new HD using a tool. I already worked with Acronis True Image 9.0 which has done a pretty good job. It's easy to use, fast and reliable. But I only got the demo version.
Now I saw that Seagate offers a free software called Seagate DiscWizard which is a customized Acronis software. It will only run with at least one Seagate drive installed (so they say) which is no problem for me. :)

So I installed the software but had some trouble at the end of the installation routine. After 99% the installer does not respond. But if you wait 5-10 minutes it finishes successfully.
The first start of the software took some time as well. It analysed the new drive which took again 5 minutes or so.
But after that it was a cakewalk to copy the data onto the new drive. After the copy has finished I disconnected the old EIDE drive and - voilà the system was fully migrated to the new drive.

New mainboard - repair XP installation - IE crashes - No windows updates

After 5 years I bought a new pc. At least I bought the new components like a mainboard, cpu and ram. I really thought that it would be as simple as changing the components and hooking up the old hard drive. But I was wrong because of Windows XP...

The system always booted into a blue screen and immediately rebooted itself. This way I couldn't even figure out what the error was. But after I searched the internet I found several posts stating that after a mainboard change you have to repair or reinstall XP again.

I didn't want to install XP from scratch (who wants to do this anyway?) so I decided to repair my existing XP installation. But first I switched the hard drive back to my old system and booted normally. Then I downloaded driver cleaner to uninstall the additional hardware drivers that had been installed for the old hardware.

After that I switched the hard drive back to the new system and booted from my XP cd. I chose to repair the existing installation (that the setup fortunately managed to find on my hd) and waited for the setup process to complete praying that everything will be alright.

After the system booted up again it really looked like everything was okay. So I started Windows Update to install the updates since SP2 again. In total it was 88 MB of updates. But although all the updates had been downloaded none of the updates succeeded. I tried it several times but Windows Update always refused to install it.

The second problem with the system was that the Internet Explorer didn't work anymore. Every time I started the IE and the window appeared I entered a URL and IE spawned a new IE window and all IEs froze and had to be killed.

Then I had the idea: Before the repair of XP I had IE7 installed. But during the repair session only the IE6 dlls and settings got restored. So maybe this mixture of IE6 and IE7 was causing the problems. So I installed the IE7 again and the system was stable again: Defender could update itself again and the IE7 worked fine.

But the Windows Updates still didn't work after that. So I searched again and found some hints on MS support web which didn't help either. But on a german website I found the necessary commands to get Windows Update working again:

regsvr32 wuapi.dll

regsvr32 wuaueng.dll

regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll

regsvr32 wucltui.dll

regsvr32 wups.dll

regsvr32 wups2.dll

regsvr32 wuweb.dll

Zonealarm and VMWare Player

I always had trouble with Zonealarm and VMWare Player. The firewall just didn't let me access the internet no matter which connection type (bridged, NAT) I configured for the guest system.
But now I have found the right answer to stop this never ending story of disappointment.
Simply go to Zonealarm and open the "firewall > zones" dialog. Here you just have to add the IP address (or range) of your guest system and set its type to "secure".
This way it works... and VMWare rocks!

Downgrade your VMWare Player

Nachdem ich mein Mainboard getauscht hatte, kam es zu einigen merkwürdigen Verhaltensänderungen. Obwohl das neue Mainboard der gleiche Typ/Marke war, so muss es wohl doch Unterschiede in der Revision gegeben haben, denn Windows wollte erneut aktiviert werden...
Naja, die Aktivierung ging über's Internet ja ganz einfach. Aber mein VMWare Player (Version 2.01) konnte keine VMs mehr starten. Bei jedem Start meiner virtuellen Maschinen wurde beim Booten der Blue Screen mit dem Fehler &x0F angezeigt.
Mehrfaches Deinstallieren und Neuinstallieren brachte keinen Erfolg. Auch ging zum Beispiel eine VMX-Datei für DamnSmallLinux noch. Aber meine eigenen Maschinen gingen immer mit einem Blue Screen unter. Lag der Fehler etwa an meinen VMs?

Das ist schon ein sehr deprimierendes Gefühl, wenn man nicht mehr an seine Entwicklungsumgebungen herankommt. Lange Zeit lebte ich also depressiv vor mich hin und suchte im Internet und den VMWare Foren nach einer Lösung für das Problem.
Und nach einigen Wochen habe ich dann den richtigen Post in einem Forum gefunden. Dort wurde über ein ähnliches Problem gesprochen, welches angeblich durch eine Unverträglichkeit mit speziellen Mainboards auftritt. Die Lösung des Problems ist einfach eine alte VMWare Player-Version zu verwenden, da bei den 1.0x-Versionen dieser Fehler scheinbar noch nicht auftritt.

Und tatsächlich: Nachdem ich meine 2.00-Version entfernt hatte (ich hatte zuvor schon einen Downgrade von 2.01 auf 2.00 versucht, der aber das Problem nicht gelöst hat) und eine 1.02-Version aufgespielt hatte, konnte ich wieder auf meine VMs zugreifen.
Gott sei Dank! Scheinbar war dies einer der seltenen Fälle, wo ein Upgrade eben nicht Probleme löst, sondern neue schafft. Warum die eigentlich gleichen Mainboards solch einen Unterschied bewirkt haben, ist mir dennoch ein Rätsel...