No optical drives?

On 12/08/2020 20.56, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Char Jackson wrote:
On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:21:33 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 12/08/2020 00.35, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Damn Windows Server 2003 required a floppy to install PERC 5/i
controller drivers on PowerEdge servers...a FLOPPY...2003...USB would
not work.

If push came to shove, without a floppy drive you could have burnt a
custom CD/DVD with \i386\$oem$\$1\drivers

Except setup would only allow drivers to be found on A: drive!

There was a command on MsDOS that made a directory appear as a drive.
Whas it "subst"?

Yes, and it's still available in Win 10. It never went away.

Ok, I haven't used it in many years.


Yeah but can you run this command from withing setup?

No, you do it in advance.


BTW this was finally straw for me and RAID. Also diag system at the time
with a live session of Linux...no need for stinkin' driver there...



--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 12/08/2020 16.14, Paul wrote:
You'd be lucky to find BluRay media for home, let alone

I get them from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.es/Verbatim-43811-Blu-ray-v%C3%ADrgenes-unidades/dp/B00DHS99PY

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 09/08/2020 07.23, micky wrote:
Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

I was watching the news the other day on TV, and noticed they were
talking about some court proceeding where a recording (video) of the
accuser was provided to the defence - as a CD. Here (Spain). I
remembered this thread immediately.

I remember some two or three years ago that the TV commented that the
annual budget had been presented to the parliament in an USB stick.

Makes sense that the courts have shifted a bit towards modernity and use
a CD :-D

No, the CD as read-only media is more reliable for a court. An USB can
be tampered with, I guess they think.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 15.47, Chris wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/08/2020 19.41, Mark Lloyd wrote:

[snip]

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

Certainly not. Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some
of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or
institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks
like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies,
because it was expensive.

I first got internet access in 1995, when the phone company made it a
local call to places that had dial-up numbers.

Problem here was that we had to pay local calls per minute of use.

Same in the UK. The US had the advantage that many telcos gave free
local/national calls in those days. That's why we always saw kids on
American shows glued to the phone. We couldn't afford to do that.

Indeed. My parents would get mad at me if I used the phone for a few
minutes.

I left home before I got internet. They got annoyed at me because they
couldn't ring me

I remember having to pay 1p/min for dialup in 1997/8, plus it blocked the
line.

I lived in a shared flat for some years, and I had to record the
timestamps of all my connections and pay for them to the common phone
"jar". Both Fidonet calls and Internet calls :-)

Yep. Exactly the same here, whilst in a shared student house.

On 14/08/2020 13.15, Chris wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 15.47, Chris wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/08/2020 19.41, Mark Lloyd wrote:

[snip]

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

Certainly not. Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some
of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or
institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks
like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies,
because it was expensive.

I first got internet access in 1995, when the phone company made it a
local call to places that had dial-up numbers.

Problem here was that we had to pay local calls per minute of use.

Same in the UK. The US had the advantage that many telcos gave free
local/national calls in those days. That's why we always saw kids on
American shows glued to the phone. We couldn't afford to do that.

Indeed. My parents would get mad at me if I used the phone for a few
minutes.

(I meant talking)


I left home before I got internet. They got annoyed at me because they
couldn't ring me

I forgot that one!


I remember having to pay 1p/min for dialup in 1997/8, plus it blocked the
line.

I lived in a shared flat for some years, and I had to record the
timestamps of all my connections and pay for them to the common phone
"jar". Both Fidonet calls and Internet calls :-)

Yep. Exactly the same here, whilst in a shared student house.





--
Cheers, Carlos.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 20.56, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

snip

Yeah but can you run this command from withing setup?

No, you do it in advance.


Which is my point. Cannot do it if you have no bootable OS on hardware.
Windows setup did not have a live session to run before setup like
Linux. And setup would not let you browse to the location for the
driver, but was hard coded for A: so you are caught in a Catch 22 scenario.

Luckily, I rummaged up and old Windows NT setup floppy and an old
Gateway system with a working floppy drive and XP Home to transfer
driver from the thumbdrive to a floppy. Still was stupid.


BTW this was finally straw for me and RAID. Also diag system at the time
with a live session of Linux...no need for stinkin' driver there...





--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

On 14/08/2020 16.41, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 20.56, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

snip

Yeah but can you run this command from withing setup?

No, you do it in advance.


Which is my point. Cannot do it if you have no bootable OS on hardware.
Windows setup did not have a live session to run before setup like
Linux. And setup would not let you browse to the location for the
driver, but was hard coded for A: so you are caught in a Catch 22 scenario.

Ah, I see.


Luckily, I rummaged up and old Windows NT setup floppy and an old
Gateway system with a working floppy drive and XP Home to transfer
driver from the thumbdrive to a floppy. Still was stupid.


BTW this was finally straw for me and RAID. Also diag system at the time
with a live session of Linux...no need for stinkin' driver there...







--
Cheers, Carlos.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 16.14, Paul wrote:
You'd be lucky to find BluRay media for home, let alone

I get them from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.es/Verbatim-43811-Blu-ray-v%C3%ADrgenes-unidades/dp/B00DHS99PY

How are BRDs compared to CDs and DVDs?
--
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Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/08/2020 07.23, micky wrote:
Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

I was watching the news the other day on TV, and noticed they were
talking about some court proceeding where a recording (video) of the
accuser was provided to the defence - as a CD. Here (Spain). I
remembered this thread immediately.

I remember some two or three years ago that the TV commented that the
annual budget had been presented to the parliament in an USB stick.

Makes sense that the courts have shifted a bit towards modernity and use
a CD :-D

No, the CD as read-only media is more reliable for a court. An USB can
be tampered with, I guess they think.

And can be archived easily.
--
Life's so loco! ..!.. *isms, sins, hates, (d)evil, illnesses (e.g., COVID-19/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2), deaths (RIP), interruptions, stresses, heat waves, fires, out(r)ages, dramas, unlucky #4, 2020, greeds, bugs (e.g., crashes & female mosquitoes), etc.
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org /
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On 14/08/2020 21.59, Ant wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 16.14, Paul wrote:
You'd be lucky to find BluRay media for home, let alone

I get them from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.es/Verbatim-43811-Blu-ray-v%C3%ADrgenes-unidades/dp/B00DHS99PY

How are BRDs compared to CDs and DVDs?

Bigger capacity :-D

That's all. Bigger capacity, thus it takes longer to write. But, some
are "archival quality", so they should last longer. Visually, they seem
the same thing.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

Ant wrote:

And can be archived easily.



There are plenty of examples where people can't retrieve the
archives because of outdated technology: Think paper tape, cassette
drives (big and small), 5 1/4" floppy drives, 3.5" floppy drives, more??
And that doesn't bring up software programs, editors, ...

On 14/08/2020 23.57, Bill wrote:
Ant wrote:

And can be archived easily.



There are plenty of examples where people can't retrieve the
archives because of outdated technology: Think paper tape, cassette
drives (big and small), 5 1/4" floppy drives, 3.5" floppy drives, more??
And that doesn't bring up software programs, editors, ...

Quite true.

Ask the NASA.


But this isn't the first time it happens in history. The Egyptians wrote
on papyrus, which degraded with time, and the texts had to be copied to
new papyrus.

And then the Alexandria library burnt and all was lost, there were no
backups.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 20.56, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

snip

Yeah but can you run this command from withing setup?
No, you do it in advance.


Which is my point. Cannot do it if you have no bootable OS on hardware.
Windows setup did not have a live session to run before setup like
Linux. And setup would not let you browse to the location for the
driver, but was hard coded for A: so you are caught in a Catch 22 scenario.

Luckily, I rummaged up and old Windows NT setup floppy and an old
Gateway system with a working floppy drive and XP Home to transfer
driver from the thumbdrive to a floppy. Still was stupid.

BTW this was finally straw for me and RAID. Also diag system at the time
with a live session of Linux...no need for stinkin' driver there...





You can:

1) Boot Win10 DVD.
2) Select Troubleshooting.
3) Select Command Prompt

You can do things from there. Diskpart allows setting up
the disk. In Command Prompt, you can copy from your external USB
stick to your newly created "helper partition".

I haven't tried it, but maybe you could do X:\setup.exe from there.

The WinPE session creates a drive letter X: and it's a RAMDisk.
And that's the "OS" used during the run. That's so the letter C:
will be available.

I haven't explored what you're referring to, since I don't
understand the need to meddle with the setup. The BIOS has
a RAID configuration screen (in some cases you must turn it on
and allow POST again, before it will work). I can use the
Intel BIOS setup screen to set up arrays before anything
else happens (both my machines have some flavor of
Intel RST capable stuff).

I see lots of capabilities on the machine, no matter
what I'm doing.

Back in WinXP days, getting to the AHCI driver on the
floppy could be annoying, but it wasn't the end of the world.
Sometimes I would miss the time window to press the
appropriate F key.

Generally speaking, if something needs doing, there is a
way to do it. I'm not aware of some large application
space where users are completely flummoxed. Drivers gate
success - there were a few flavors of Windows with
poor driver availability.

When doing a Repair Install, when the Setup screen takes
over, I can do control-alt-delete and bring up
Task Manager and then the underlying desktop is visible
again. I haven't tried that during a Clean Install, because
there's no reason to believe it will work. But you don't
know these things until you try.

I think I was able to run a few 32-bit GUI programs from
WinPE. Not everything would work. (And this only worked
from a 32-bit installer DVD, not 64-bit.) But generally speaking,
things are a bit "looser" than in WinXP days, and that's why
you need to be inventive if you have an obscure need.
You never know what cracks are in the wallpaper until you try.

If it was WinXP and you hit a wall, I'd say "give up already".
With Windows 10, there's still hope. You might bounce off
the wall instead.

Paul

Paul wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 12/08/2020 20.56, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

snip

Yeah but can you run this command from withing setup?
No, you do it in advance.


Which is my point. Cannot do it if you have no bootable OS on hardware.
Windows setup did not have a live session to run before setup like
Linux. And setup would not let you browse to the location for the
driver, but was hard coded for A: so you are caught in a Catch 22
scenario.

Luckily, I rummaged up and old Windows NT setup floppy and an old
Gateway system with a working floppy drive and XP Home to transfer
driver from the thumbdrive to a floppy. Still was stupid.

BTW this was finally straw for me and RAID. Also diag system at the
time
with a live session of Linux...no need for stinkin' driver there...





You can:

1) Boot Win10 DVD.
2) Select Troubleshooting.
3) Select Command Prompt

*Windows 2003 Server*. Windows 10 did not exist... But Linux at the time
did have live session installers for some time.


--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Jonathan N. Little wrote:

*Windows 2003 Server*. Windows 10 did not exist... But Linux at the time
did have live session installers for some time.

Isn't Windows 2003 server the SKU with bad driver support ?

One of the OSes, like on NICs, the entry for that would
be suspiciously missing.

Paul