Hope this is the right forum, from what I've seen I think I'm in the right place 
Well I'm sure there are a lot of PC Technicians here...and I'm sure most of you are super geeky enough to have wasted massive amounts of time making the 'Ultimate TechCD'!!! Well I'm working on my latest revision, and I wanted to see if some of you all can help with some things.
My ultimate goal is to have one CD that has all the Win9x OS's, another with all the Win2000 OS's, and another with WinXP OS's...I've read up on that and found a few sites that help with the latter two of the three CD's, using a really cool app from Microsoft. So those three are solved...then I have another that has all my essential applications...Ghost, NAV, R-Studio, WinAmp, WinRAR, etc...stuff I need to install sometimes on a clients computer and then take off when done. Made a nifty little Autorun thing for that since most of those are installed in Windows. AutoPlay Menu Studio is what I used BTW. So that's four...the fifth and sixth CD are much more elaborate!
On the fifth I'm looking to have a bootable CD with various apps like NAV Command Line (For Virus Scan's outside the OS), Troubleshooter, Ghost, Lost And Found, and Partition Magic. I'm thinking I'm gonna make disc images of them all, them use a multi-image bootloader to select the one I want. Only problem is I find a lot of these require write access to some files on the disc images, and since it's running off a CD that's not possible...any ideas? A friend suggested a RAM Disk, but how will that work for applications like Troubleshooter which load there own OS?
The sixth CD is more of a Windows questions...a lot of the onsites I do don't have fast access or any access! So if I need to do a clean install or just update their computer it wastes a lot of time, which means a lot of money! So I've been looking around and I've found all the updates for Win9x OS's, and there is the Windows Update Catalog for Win2000/WinXP...but here's the question: How can I install these without having to reboot fifty million times? When you use Windows Update, it will install most all updates at once then reboot and you're done...but with the ones I've downloaded each one wants to reboot. I know you can click 'No' but just how safe is that...some updates change the same file so doing that three or four times can't be good. Also, I've learned to Slipstream SP's into Win2000, but is there a way to Slipstream individual updates into it? A friend suggested for the clean installs I make an image of a fresh install, update it, then remove all the hardware from the registry so that when I transfer it to a machine and it boots up it finds all the new stuff. I tried that by removing the 'Enum' key in the registry but when it boots up it's not too happy
I know that's a lot of questions, but I do appreciate any help! Thanx in advance!
Lee
This is not a Highly Technical topic.
AnandTech Moderator
Well I'm sure there are a lot of PC Technicians here...and I'm sure most of you are super geeky enough to have wasted massive amounts of time making the 'Ultimate TechCD'!!! Well I'm working on my latest revision, and I wanted to see if some of you all can help with some things.
My ultimate goal is to have one CD that has all the Win9x OS's, another with all the Win2000 OS's, and another with WinXP OS's...I've read up on that and found a few sites that help with the latter two of the three CD's, using a really cool app from Microsoft. So those three are solved...then I have another that has all my essential applications...Ghost, NAV, R-Studio, WinAmp, WinRAR, etc...stuff I need to install sometimes on a clients computer and then take off when done. Made a nifty little Autorun thing for that since most of those are installed in Windows. AutoPlay Menu Studio is what I used BTW. So that's four...the fifth and sixth CD are much more elaborate!
On the fifth I'm looking to have a bootable CD with various apps like NAV Command Line (For Virus Scan's outside the OS), Troubleshooter, Ghost, Lost And Found, and Partition Magic. I'm thinking I'm gonna make disc images of them all, them use a multi-image bootloader to select the one I want. Only problem is I find a lot of these require write access to some files on the disc images, and since it's running off a CD that's not possible...any ideas? A friend suggested a RAM Disk, but how will that work for applications like Troubleshooter which load there own OS?
The sixth CD is more of a Windows questions...a lot of the onsites I do don't have fast access or any access! So if I need to do a clean install or just update their computer it wastes a lot of time, which means a lot of money! So I've been looking around and I've found all the updates for Win9x OS's, and there is the Windows Update Catalog for Win2000/WinXP...but here's the question: How can I install these without having to reboot fifty million times? When you use Windows Update, it will install most all updates at once then reboot and you're done...but with the ones I've downloaded each one wants to reboot. I know you can click 'No' but just how safe is that...some updates change the same file so doing that three or four times can't be good. Also, I've learned to Slipstream SP's into Win2000, but is there a way to Slipstream individual updates into it? A friend suggested for the clean installs I make an image of a fresh install, update it, then remove all the hardware from the registry so that when I transfer it to a machine and it boots up it finds all the new stuff. I tried that by removing the 'Enum' key in the registry but when it boots up it's not too happy
I know that's a lot of questions, but I do appreciate any help! Thanx in advance!
Lee
This is not a Highly Technical topic.
AnandTech Moderator
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