Posts Tagged ‘command’
Slipstream Service Packs Into Windows XP Installation Disk
To slipstream (=integrate) MS Windows Service Packs into an existing Windows XP Installation Disk you need an installation Disk, a working copy of Windows, the downloaded Service Pack, a burning software capable of burning bootable images (for example ImgBurn, which is also free), a DVD burner and an empty disk.
First copy all files of the installation disk into a folder on your hard disk (don’t forget any hidden files) and download the Service Packs you need. Then open a command line by typing cmd into a Run… prompt and direct it to the directory the Service Pack you want to integrate is in with the cd (change directory) command, for example like this:
cd C:\Service_Packs
Don’t forget to double-quote the path if there are any Space characters in it. Next, enter the file name of the Service Pack followed by the integrate switch and the path of the installation disk files in the following syntax:
WINDOWSXP-KB936929-SP3-X86-DEU.EXE /integrate:C:\Windows_XP_Install
Windows_XP_Install is the folder where I copied the files of the disk into and is located directly on the <em>C:</em> drive. After the process is done, create an image from the altered installation files and burn it as bootable CD/DVD.
Add Defragment Command to Drives’ Context Menu
Since it takes a relatively long time to browse the Windows Control Panel to find the items you are in need of, here is a workaround for one of the items you probably use or should use most, the defragmentation of drives. This guide describes how you use the Windows Registry to add the defragment-command right into the drives’ context menu appearing on right-click.
To do so, open the registry by entering regedit into a Run… prompt. What appears is a window parted into two frames, a large arrangement of directories (keys) on the left and their contents on the right. Browse the following key in the left frame:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell
Now right-click the shell key, select New > Key and name it runas. Runas (run as…) defines a new entry in the context menu which lets you open a file, in our case a drive, with a certain application. Look at the contents of runas and double-click the (Default)-value. Change it to the name you want to be displayed in the menu, e.g. Defragment Drive.
Now right-click the created runas-key and create another key inside of that, call it Command. The value inside of that key determines which action should be run upon using the option.
Now you basically could enter any command you can enter in a Windows command line. For defragmentation, the command is defrag followed by the drive and a number of possible switches. To look up which switches are possible, enter defrag -? into a command line. The switch characters are then added to the command lead by a hyphen, as the question-mark before. I think defrag %1 -Uv is basically a good option, so I change the (Default)-value to defrag %1 -Uv. After that, close the registry and right-click a drive and use your newly created defragment-command:
Disable “Send to” Option on Windows
When you right-click any object on a Windows system, there is the option Send to which is able to literally send objects to other computers by automatically opening a new mail and attaching the chosen file as attachment, process them with other programs selectable from a list, or just moving the file to a different location (hold the Shift key when right-clicking to enable more options to Send to). The common user however does not use this function really often, in fact, he may also find it annoying since it might cause short freezes on slower computers if one accidently hovers the mouse over it and thus makes it load a list of applications. But as for every other problem on your computer there is also a solution for this one, disabling the Send to command with the registry.
To do that, open your registry by entering regedit in to a Run… prompt and direct it to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Send To key.
Now the default value that is found in that key is
{7BA4C740-9E81-11CF-99D3-00AA004AE837}
If you ever want to revert your setting the easiest way is to just save this value somewhere safe, since the thing you need to do to disable the Send to command is to double-click the value and remove the string so that it is empty. Leave the registry afterwards and the command should no longer appear on right-clicking.
Back up Files on Windows with HoboCopy
HoboCopy is a commandline program that lets you copy large amounts of data in a comparatively short time to other copy functions. However, the clue is that it takes a snapshot of the file system before copying, making it possible to copy files that are being used without having to close them or end processes. It can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/candera/hobocopy/downloads
Extract the files to any directory (preferably one that is easy to access). To use it, open a Command Prompt (or cmd on Windows XP) and direct it to the directory where you have extracted the Hobocopy files to by using the cd (change directory) command. In my case, I have extracted the files onto a folder on my Desktop (the directory must be specified in double quotes if a space character was used in any of the folders’ names):
cd “C:\Users\howtoforge\Desktop\HoboCopy stable”
This is necessary if you want to run HoboCopy because it is only running through a command prompt and the command prompt cannot start it without knowing where it is located. If you doubleclicked on the HoboCopy icon in the explorer, it would only blink up for a split-second and vanish after that, and if you started it with the command without directing the prompt to its location it would only give you:
C:\Users\howtoforge>hobocopy
‘hobocopy’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
C:\Users\howtoforge>
The basic structure of the command looks like this: hobocopy “C:\source\directory” “C:\destination\directory”
However there are a lot of useful extra options available, as for example incremental copying, meaning it only copies the files that are new to the destination folder. A full list of options can be found here (scroll down to the USAGE section):
https://github.com/candera/hobocopy/
As example of how to use HoboCopy I am going to show you how to copy your Windows Live Mail folder to another directory to back it up (backups usually only make sense on different partitions or external hard drives, but for demonstrational purposes I am going to copy it to a folder on the same hard drive).
The Windows Live Mail folder on Windows 7 is located in “C:\Users\howtoforge\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail” (the AppData folder is hidden, you may have to make it visible through the folder options in the Control Panel first). Open up a command prompt and direct it to the location of your HoboCopy file with the cd command as shown above. I want to do an incremental (includes a statefile, as said in the usage section of the project page), recursive copy of the folder, meaning that it only copies the files that are new to the destination folder and includes all subdirectories of the chosen folder, not just the files. To accomplish that, my command has to be this:
hobocopy /statefile=state.txt /incremental /recursive “C:\Users\howtoforge\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail” “C:\Users\howtoforge\Desktop\destination”
