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Take a look at the setupdi functions. They are how you can query device informaitonm from usermode.
Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription
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I actually have an implementation that uses those functions; unfortunately, they are not all necessarily supported on Windows 2000: it depends on how up-to-date the machine is. Sorry, I'm just making this really difficult  (It's not intentional, however; it just our current predicament.)
Regards,
-B
"[F]reedom isn't a licence, it's responsibility." [David Gerrold, Author's Note in "The Man Who Folded Himself", 2003, p. 119]
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If SP4 gives you those functions then surely you can mandate it?
Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription
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We may just have to; I was just hoping that we could cover everyone, including those who do not want to touch any of their perfectly-ok-and-running-machines. If I had any say in it, I'd make XP the base requirements, period; unfortunately, we have far too many people with production Windows 2000 machines for this to be feasible.
Thank you for your help. I'll need to further contemplate how backwards compatible we care to--or can--be.
Regards,
-B
"[F]reedom isn't a licence, it's responsibility." [David Gerrold, Author's Note in "The Man Who Folded Himself", 2003, p. 119]
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I know what you mean. I've still got an NT4 box for testing one of the apps I'm responsible for.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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My condolences 
I believe we dropped that flavour of Windows just before I joined the team. A lot of the core kernel calls was there, but some of the niceties are only just being address now.
Regards,
-B
"[F]reedom isn't a licence, it's responsibility." [David Gerrold, Author's Note in "The Man Who Folded Himself", 2003, p. 119]
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I'm doing C# work, not drivers so it's not as bad, but there've been more than a few places where I've been burned by win32 changes. Two that I recall are the behavior of a listbox if you click in the empty area below the last item, and that NT4 doesn't correctly display 32bit color depth icons. The customer this software is for has never moved past 2k to XP (claimed not to be able to turn off some XP services that tried doing auto updates when on isolated networks). We think, but aren't sure that all the NT4 boxes are finally gone, and that the next rev of the software (whenever that is) can be 2k only.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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dan neely wrote: I'm doing C# work, not drivers
Thats worse. The kernel never changes that much, 95% of todays kernel api on Windows 7 is just the same as NT4 (its probably the same as NT 3 but I didnt start writing drivers till NT4). The only new bit is PnP and power stuff, and in fact an NT4 driver can still run on Vista etc. They are also all written in C.
By comparison, having new apis / languages thrust on you every time the latest catchword technology hits the streets, COM, Java, .Net etc, many of which end up dying after 5 or 10 years wasting all the effort one invested as a career move.
Give me the kernel anyday.
Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription
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Anyone not using a tried and tested service pack for an OS is a dick anyway so just tell them feature 'X' isnt available unless they do.
Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription
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I'm pretty sure they wouldn't take to kindly to that
Like I mentioned before, if I had my druthers, they'd all be forced to use XP SP3, no exception. Unfortunately, the reality is that this will not happen, and there is no reason for them to update the old machines, in their minds, since none of the boxes face the outside world. It will slowly happen, however, as they retire old hardware: so I'll just bide my time.
Regards,
-B
"[F]reedom isn't a licence, it's responsibility." [David Gerrold, Author's Note in "The Man Who Folded Himself", 2003, p. 119]
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Hi All,
Today I just re-installed my Graphics Driver with the latest WHQL Driver release (175) for nVidia 8800 GT under Windows XP. I had installed beta version of their new driver which comes with CUDA 2.0. The performance was much lower when I installed the beta one. That was the reason I switched back to my older version of driver.
but during the installation the screen went blank 2-3 times and finally, it had shown "No signal". I tried with restoring old restore points and boot the machine with last known good configuration. but I never could install the driver for that.
Finally I formatted Windows XP and tried installing it fresh. but again it has been failed. The same problem occurs. In the same machine I've an installation of Windows Vista, which is working fine with the hardware.
When I checked the device manager i found that the driver for PCI Device is missing. But aint sure whether we need to install these things or not. However its not get going. Can you help me in this regard?
-Sarath.
"Great hopes make everything great possible" - Benjamin Franklin
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I just replaced my monitor with another one. then it was working fine. I think it's the problem with monitor driver. It seems to be corrupted somehow and loading the resolution and refreshing rate which the monitor can't handle.
-Sarath.
"Great hopes make everything great possible" - Benjamin Franklin
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Have you tried connecting both the working and non working monitors at the same time? You should be able to control the system using the former and change the latter to a generic monitor driver and set it to run at a resolution/refresh rate it will function at.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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I've got a WD My Book Premium ES 500GB external hard disk (and most likely will never be buying anything from Western Digital in the future). I should have read Amazon customer reviews before I bought it, oh well...
It started dying after 11 months (or so) with Acronis TrueImage complaining that it could not read from some sectors. Now I have it off for most of the time as it's constantly spinning after powered up and slows down Windows, even hangs up Explorer (I think this should not happen, Vista should cope with a non-accessible external hard drive where there's nothing OS related, right?!  ).
Anyway, I suspect this may be only a corrupt NTFS, because it's generally accessible after some time. I looked at it in GParted and it just told me to run chkdsk /f. Fine, but this particular drive has a feature which puts it in a stand by mode when it's idle for 10mins or more. So, I run CHKDSK and it happily proceeds to fix some errors with MFT and Virtual Map (whatever this is..), but after some time I notice it's not 'moving' (CHKDSK, that is) and the drive is in stand by mode - at this point I can no longer access its contents w/o restarting it. :/
Do you have any ideas on how to prevent it from going to sleep?
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Assuming the warranty is void (or you value your data more than the remainder of it), pop it out of the enclosure and connect it as an internal HD to your PC.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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dan neely wrote: Assuming the warranty is void
I think I have 1 more year to go.  I'm trying to solve the problem myself without support first and without tinkering with hardware, but thanks.
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Pawel Krakowiak wrote: I think I have 1 more year to go.
that makes it more interesting, your warranty coverage will most likely result in your getting a new package and loosing whatever data was on the drive itself. The only possible exception would be if they did a diagnosis first and IDed a problem with the enclosure itself.
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I have some paper with a support ID which says the expiry date is 3/31/09 and on the box it says I have 3 years limited warranty. I still have to consult the supplier and the invoice I got when I bought it.
But I would really like to copy a few files and ideally wipe out the disk before I give it away for support, I'm kinda paranoid.
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Sector read errors are hardly just a corrupted NTFS issue. The drive is having problems reading the physical disk. The reason the drive goes to sleep is because there is no I/O activity going on. CHKDSK sent commands to the drive which either didn't get to the drive, or the drive didn't process and CHKDSK is still waiting. Therefore, since neither CHKDSK nor the drive is hearing what it needs to, the drive goes to sleep. Since CHKDSK very nearly keeps I/O going on the drive continuously, AFAICT, no, there is no way to turn this off on the drive.
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Another thing I noticed is that if I power up the drive in Windows, it starts spinning (at least the light circle indicator does) continuously and is inaccessible during that time. It takes at least a few minutes for it to 'calm down'.
I tried running HDD Regenerator, but since its a USB drive the program can't access it before Windows loads.  HDD Regenerator uses some Windows 98 stuff, I am running Vista.
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You have no choice but to take the drive out of the enclosure and stick in the machine. If the drive won't access for minutes at a time, the drive is having problems with any of the following:
-Maintaining spindle speed
-Seek position
-BoT "heartbeat"
-Communication with the USB host (NOT the computer). This is the interface doing the translation between USB and the drive controller.
None of this stuff is going to be fixed by any piece of software you have, or can get...
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Thanks. It became inaccessible anyway.  I just wanted to try to get a few files and perhaps wipe it out, but I guess I have no choice and have to hand it over to support. I do have the warranty yet. By the way - it passes SMART tests...
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Hi!
I have a project that requires a Win2k system to reboot without reinitialization of the parallel port. The post must initialize obviously but I don't want it to change the pin settings.
Currently, I'm using a hardware solution that is clumsy at best, using a gate, a latch and a debounce chip.
Does anyone have any circuit solutions? The simplest is of most interest.
Thanks
SpaceDoc
SpaceDoc
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My HD has ckt board damaged and may be motor is
also demaged is there any method to get data from HD plates
Can i put plates in another HD and get it?
Thanx
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If the new drive is identical to the firmware revision of the old one yes. If you do this, the drive is not fixed permanently. breaking the clean room seal will cause it to die in short order, so immediately copy all your data off after reassembly. If the data on the drive is worth spending several hundred to several thousand dollars to be professionally recovered, don't attempt this or any other DIY repair efforts. IF they fail you've probably destroyed the data beyond recovery.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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