Help setting up a refurbished Dell laptop

[Robert M Jones]

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I am setting up a refurbished Dell D600 Latitude laptop for my daughter.
Before I hand it over I am trying to prepare for disaster!

It came with XP Pro SP1 onboard, and a version of Norton Ghost. DVD/CDRW
drive. No floppy drive. It has an Ethernet port and wireless card and I
have added it successfully to my home network. One partition and no
evidence of a recovery partition. I am required to make my own recovery
images using Ghost which I am in the process of doing. I have updated
the XP Pro to SP2 and subsequent updates, and installed Norton AV (free
from my ISP), ZA free, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, and will be
putting Open Office, along with antispyware and Mailwasher.

I also have a bootable BootItNG CD made for my XP Home desktop and am
hoping to use it to create an extra partition on the laptop HDD to give
me somewhere to put future backup image files of C:\ so I can then
easily move them onto my home wireless network in a Windows environment.
In the windows mode I have full (Windows) network transferability
between the two computers, and I have a folder on my desktop mapped as a
Z drive on the laptop to facilitate any transfers or even Ghost working
over the network. Everything can see everything on the network.

But - a number of problems I would like some advice on please.

I would like if possible to try and create a hard copy of the XP Pro OS
slipstreamed with SP2 but the methods I have researched rely on the
laptop having a C:/I386 folder which this one doesn't have - there are a
number of small i386 folders dotted around the C:\ partition but they
don't have the sort of files I would expect on a Windows CD. Any other
way of getting an OS copy out of this machine please?

How can I create a bootable CD to use on the laptop with Ghost for
restore? It only offers options of making a bootable floppy and there is
no floppy drive? To make a bootable CD it asks for a Win98 type rescue
floppy - but of course there is no floppy drive! Should the worst case
crash scenario occur then I would not be able to boot from the HDD and
use the normal Ghost interface.

Finally - the instructions for networking under the Ghost PC-DOS
environment have totally defeated me. Can this be done using ethernet or
wireless or do I have to use usb? And how do I locate the relevant
drivers for use in the Ghost PC-DOS environment?

Apologies if this isn't the best group - redirection instructions
willingly accepted. This is the first time I've worked with a laptop and
with a pre-installed OS - normally I build my own desktop machine and
install OEM OS from scratch.

--
Rev Robert M Jones, Wimborne Baptist Church, UK
http://www.wimborne-baptist.org.uk
Free trial of Mailwasher Pro - effective email spam filter - (commission
goes to our partners in Bulgaria)
http://fta.firetrust.com/index.cgi?id=420

 

[Adam Leinss]

I would like if possible to try and create a hard copy of the XP Pro
OS slipstreamed with SP2 but the methods I have researched rely on the
laptop having a C:/I386 folder which this one doesn't have - there are
a number of small i386 folders dotted around the C:\ partition but
they don't have the sort of files I would expect on a Windows CD. Any
other way of getting an OS copy out of this machine please?

Probably not...OEMs give out repackaged Windows OS installations or
"images" of their software. There are SLP (OEM), retail and volume
versions of XP Pro, each being incompatible with each other (product key
wise).

How can I create a bootable CD to use on the laptop with Ghost for
restore? It only offers options of making a bootable floppy and there
is no floppy drive? To make a bootable CD it asks for a Win98 type
rescue floppy - but of course there is no floppy drive! Should the
worst case crash scenario occur then I would not be able to boot from
the HDD and use the normal Ghost interface.

Just use a bootable floppy disk image from www.bootdisk.com. In Nero,
pick "Bootable CD" and then feed it the bootable floppy image. CD
booting "El Torito" style is nothing more then the CD using floppy disk
emulation to boot.

You would need to do this process on another PC of course.

Finally - the instructions for networking under the Ghost PC-DOS
environment have totally defeated me. Can this be done using ethernet
or wireless or do I have to use usb? And how do I locate the relevant
drivers for use in the Ghost PC-DOS environment?

If the image is kept local, you really shouldn't need any drivers.

In the past, I just used a generic network boot disk from www.nu2.nu to
get network access in DOS, then loaded Ghost automatically in
autoexec.net.

Apologies if this isn't the best group - redirection instructions
willingly accepted. This is the first time I've worked with a laptop
and with a pre-installed OS - normally I build my own desktop machine
and install OEM OS from scratch.

I would just make a bootable CD with Ghost on your main machine, then
dump the image to the second partition. Wouldn't that work?

Adam