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3-4-04
Last week the Windows Tip left off with the install of Windows 9x/ME on a partial partition or full partition on a primary hard drive for the purposes of dual booting a single PC. This week we’ll pick up with installing the second OS.
If you’re using the
84Killdisk and have a second hard drive in the system that already contains a
partition, you’ll want to boot to it again and choose Option 3, then run
fdisk. Click Enter when asked about
Large Disk Support and you’ll come to the main menu. Click 5 and Enter to change hard drives
and choose drive 2. Click 3 to
delete partition or Logical DOS Drive, then 1 to remove the Primary DOS
Partition. That should clear the
drive. Then hit Escape twice and
turn the PC off.
Now power up and place the
OS CD you want to install into the CD drive. This is where it gets easy for me to
write about but difficult to explain because all the NT based versions of
Windows and EVERY version of Linux does this
differently.
Boot from the CD and just
follow the prompts to install. If
you use a single drive you’ll want to choose the unpartitioned space when asked
where to install. Dual drives,
you’ll choose the second one.
From this point you’ll just
follow the prompts to install the second OS. NT based Windows will install the boot
loader on the primary drive or partition by default. Linux loads may ask about something
called Grub or Lilo (which are Linux boot loaders) and you may have to tell them
where to install and which OS you want to boot by default.
As a general rule I’ve found
that the second OS will set the boot loader to default to them, meaning a load
of ME/2000 will boot 2000 if you don’t change selections when the boot menu
comes up.
If all of this sounds a
little scary but you still want to boot multiple Operating Systems you have a
couple of choices. Many Linux
distros are available as bootable CD images and Microsoft has come out with a
program called Virtual PC, which allows you to load older versions of Windows
that will run within the Windows XP environment.
The most well known bootable
Linux distro is Knoppix. You can
download it from http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
and, once you burn the .iso to CD, just pop it in the CD drive and boot straight
into it without making any changes to the content of your hard drive
whatsoever.
Knoppix has been so popular
that it has sparked many, many alternative versions. Since it’s open source software users
are free to make any changes they wish and redistribute it under a different
name, as long as they do so for free.
Examples are Gnoppix, which
is a version that uses the GNU GUI (Graphical User Interface) rather than the
original KDE, Knoppix STD (Security Tools Distribution) and Penguin Sleuth,
which specializes in computer forensics tasks.
You can find these and
hundreds of other bootable CD distros at http://www.linux.org/dist/list.html.
On the Windows side, the
Virtual PC software allows installation of previous versions of Windows on XP,
which run in their own virtual environment. The look and feel of the OS, as well as
features and resource management, gives you the utility of a dual boot Windows
machine with the convenience of not having to reboot to play an older game or
run an older program.
Virtual PC weighs in at $129
retail, so obviously experimenting with Linux is cheaper but if you miss playing
your original DOS based Castle Wolfenstein it might be worth it.
Download tipper Troy Overton
features yet another GUI based bootable OS this week, this one based on a
diskette, Matt Dattilo takes his turn as News Editor in slapping the RIAA, Hash
offers up a housekeeping chore for OS X in the Mac Tip, I’ll warn you about a
dangerous commercial currently airing on TechTV in the Windows Tip and a reader
contributes this week’s Email of the Week.
Who could ask for anything
more?
Kevin Mefford,
Editor
The MP3 digital music format
has become a part of many of our lives.
Now the people who created the format are creating a newer version, which
will contain a feature the RIAA will love---copy
protection:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994731
Many people ask what virus
writers have to gain from practicing their craft. After all, there’s not any money in
it. While this may have been true
at one time, Heise Online claims there may be a money motive after
all:
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/44879
We talked a couple of weeks
ago about broadband Internet access over power lines. Now, Cinergy is promising to roll out
service in Cincinnati, northern Kentucky and, later, most of Kentucky and
Indiana:
http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5168322.html?tag=nefd_top
Gateway, the recent
purchaser of eMachines, plans to cut 1,000 more jobs this year in an effort to
remain competitive:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5168380.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed
Matthew
Dattilo
Hello
again to all the 84Online subscribers!
I
appreciate your input over the past few weeks regarding the downloads that
you’ve tried, and the ones you have found and would like to see. Keep ‘em
coming!
Over
the past few months, it seems that there are so many things that we have to do
with our computers just to keep up. Anti-virus this, spyware that… What happened
to the days when using computers was about fun, and learning? Some may say that
those days are gone, but I beg to differ. While I find that my computers are a
valuable resource for information and organization, I mainly use computers
because I think its fun.
Part
of the fun for me is the challenge of trying a new piece of software and seeing
what I can make it do. There are so many people who have genius ideas, and when
something comes out, I’ll give it a whack.
So
here’s the whack. I heard about a new operating system that fits on a single
floppy disk! Now before the groans begin, let me tell you this little guy has a
small shoe but a big footprint. MenuetOS (http://www.menuetos.org) is a full GUI OS
with more features than one could ever believe would fit on a single
disk.
Granted
there are limitations. That is to be expected. But execute a program in this
environment and see how quickly it responds! Brilliant!
MenuetOS
has email, Shoutcast and web server software. It also includes a few games, like
Tetris and chess. It has a PPP dialer and will support multiple types of
networks.
MenuetOS
was written in assembly, which is how it is able to do what it does and at the
speed that it works. Programs are assembled as opposed to compiled, and if you
are not familiar with what that means we’ll do a quick article in a future
issue.
I
know there seems to be a blossoming trend in bootable disk operating systems.
You might remember my comments to Fred Langa in the LangaList last year
regarding the power of Knoppix, and Linux operating systems of this type in
general. While I think this is a fun thing to play around with, I wouldn’t plan
my migration from Windows or OSX just yet.
Happy
Downloading,
Troy
Overton
Disk
Permissions
Although OS X pretty
much takes care of itself, one of the important housekeeping items that you can
do on a periodic basis is to verify and repair Disk Permissions. This is
especially true if you routinely install and delete applications. This is easy
to accomplish even for a novice user.
Go to Applications - Utilities -
Disk Utility
Click on your Hard Drive name / icon
Under the First Aid Tab
you will see two buttons.
1. Verify Disk permissions and
2. Repair Disk
Permissions.
Click on the Repair Disk Permissions button and let the
Application do it's thing. You might see a bunch of text messages show up in the
window telling you what files OS X is fixing. Unless you are a Unix/BSD hack,
that text is pretty much meaningless to you.
Once finished, just close
out of the application and you are done. I recommend repairing disk permissions
as a monthly housekeeping item. It is also recommended that you do this before
and after installing applications, and especially before installing any OS X
updates. Many security update installation failures have been cured by doing
this.
One thing to remember is that OS X, being based on BSD, was meant
to run all the time. Therefore its automatic regular maintenance is scheduled to
run in the middle of the night, usually around 2 AM. If you are one of those
that shuts off their Mac when not in use, or have a laptop, there is a great
application that you can use to manually perform all the maintenance functions.
It is called Cocktail and you can find it here:
http://www.macosxcocktail.com/
It has a very simple user friendly Interface that makes it very easy to
use.
Hash
hash@ucanweb.com
I saw something advertised
on TechTV recently that scared me to death; A commercial for Stop Sign antivirus
protection from eAnthology. Now
every website, spyware scanner and forum in the world (other than eAnthology’s
website and forum posts made by their employees) universally identify this
software as Malware/Spyware.
You can read horror stories
through a Google search from folks who had the software just show up on their
PC, how you can’t uninstall it, how it scanned and “found” multiple viruses that
NO other scanner found and how it damaged or removed programs like Ad-Aware,
SpyBot, ZoneAlarm and Norton and PC-Cillin antivirus programs. Yeesh.
To test this I did a clean
install of 98SE on my testbed PC. I
loaded no drivers that didn’t come from the 98 load (I even used an ancient ISA
3Com ethernet card that would use the 98 driver) and went to eAnthology’s
website for a free install of the Stop Sign demo
program.
By the time I was finished
my original single open website had multiplied to five, I had two programs open
and had installed Kon-X ISP software and Oodlz game software (with no options to
not install these programs). And
the scan found only Alexa, which is a toothless old third party spyware browser
plug-in that has been purchased and incorporated into Internet
Explorer.
Of course my results page
from the free scan informed me “Warning!
Your machine is infected!” with a link to tell me how to clean it. Clicking on that asked me to divulge my
email address, then sent me to a “secure site” with an expired Security
Certificate. From there I could
cough up $24.95 to clean my PC and receive a “free” month’s membership, whatever
that means. Naturally I
declined.
Closing all those open
windows resulted in a couple of pop-ups then a prompt to reboot, which I
did. I immediately went to the
Control Panel and entered Add/Remove Programs. I opted to uninstall eAnthology and was
asked if I wanted to just disable the Auto-Scan (the default) or remove Stop
Sign. I chose the latter and was
then presented with a screen listing all the possible eAnthology programs to
uninstall. Only the AV, Spam and
Pop-Up components were listed as Installed Programs, which I added to the
uninstall list.
I was prompted to reboot to
uninstall files that were in use.
After a fresh boot I installed SpyBot and Ad-Aware and updated both of
them. SpyBot found Alexa (which it
removed for free) plus a DSO exploit and some sort of screen saver hijacker (the
exploit is a known security problem with IE that has been fixed in one of the
updates but I can only assume the hijacker came from
eAnthology).
Ad-Aware found an
eAcceleration registry entry and several tracking cookies from Stop Sign. And here I thought this program was
supposed to combat tracking cookies, not plant
them…
Obviously I would caution
readers NOT to purchase Stop Sign software (which has a monthly fee of $7.00 for
VIP membership that they hawk as providing FREE unlimited telephone
support). As much as I dislike
Norton and McAfee products I would recommend them over this
tripe.
Editor’s note: This was sent in response to last week’s email question.
With regard to your reader
who had a corrupted floppy, I had the same problem with a SmartMedia card from
my digital camera. Neither the camera nor the card reader would read it
and I hated to think I had lost the data. I tried the various scan programs with
no success.
I used a program from PC
Inspector http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm called
"smart recovery" that was able to read the disk and recover all but one picture
(it was probably the offending item). Needless to say, I was very pleased
with the results.
Thanks to all of you for
your great newsletter & radio show.
Bill
Bailey
If you have tech support
questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please email them to bob@iglou.com.
Copyright 2004, The 84
Online Team. All rights
reserved. Publication, rebroadcast
or storage is prohibited without prior consent, however you may freely forward
this publication to friends as long as A) it is forwarded in its entirety and B)
no fee is charged.
Information provided in this
publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed
or implied. Although the
information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL
systems. Make use of any
information supplied at your own risk.
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