Windoze hints

Why did I write this file although I use mostly Linux anyway? Well, nowadays you have to struggle everywhere (especially at work) with or against windows. So some knowledge about it wont hurt.

Installation (applies to Win98)

Believe it or not, even if everyone tells you that windoze is sooooo easy to use, even on its installation there are some very nasty traps:

Check twice that the option Virus Warning is disabled in your BIOS settings. Else installation will hang up after shoe-shining your floppy disk.
Make sure you have only ONE primary partition marked as FAT16 filesystem (type 0x06) else you won't be able to even start installation.

Backup/new HardDisk/Product-key missing (Win98)

Now lets say you have a working Win98 installation but want to migrate this to a new harddisk, but can't remember where you put that damned product key ?
Easy solution: Start regedit on your working Win98 and look at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProductKey

Tuning bootup and more (Win98,WinXP)

Try msconfig.exe

Tuning and find out network settings (Win 98)

Try winipcfg.exe

Restore system to a previous (known working) state (Win XP)

Open a console and run %systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

List of last used documents (and how to edit it...)

c:\dokumente und einstellungen\user\zuletzt verwendete dokumente\

Save and restore NTFS filesystems under Linux

To make a compressed backup of the NTFS filesystem stored on /dev/sda2 you would type:

ntfsclone -s -o - /dev/sda2 |gzip -c > partition.img.gz

and to restore such a backup image to /dev/sda2 you enter simply:

gzip -dc partition.img.gz | ntfsclone -r - -O /dev/sda2

There are rumours that windows will only be able to boot if the partition parameters (start sector, size etc.) are exactly the same when the backup was made.
While I have not verified this, it would be wise to backup the partition table, too.