How to Exit Virtual Clone Drive

Remove Slysoft's Virtual CloneDrive from the System Tray

If the Virtual Clone Drive icon is active in the Windows systray and you want to remove it and exit the program do the following in the Settings menu:

1. Set the number of drives to Disabled or zero.
2. Untick the Show Tray Icon checkbox.
3. Click OK.

VMware Player for 32-bit x86 Computers

VMware Player is free virtualization software provided by VMware that allows one to run a virtual machine on a computer. It is an introductory less feature rich version than some of their other products such as VMware Workstation.

The most recent VMware versions can only run on 64-bit processors. To run VMware Player on 32-bit processors (x86) download install and run VMware Player 3.1.6.

Update: VMware Player 6.0.5 now also runs on 32-bit processors.

Refresh Icons in Windows 7

Clear Windows 7 Desktop Icon Cache

Select the Windows button and in the search box type and run the following

ie4uinit.exe -ClearIconCache

Boot CD Won't Boot After Motherboard Change

Problem with Boot CD After Changing Motherboard

The scenario:

You created a boot CD previously to help you recover in case of computer problems.  Your computer motherboard breaks down and is replaced.  You want to reinstall your old hard drive but it is giving you problems so you take out your boot CD that you created just for such a situation and are flummoxed when even your boot CD won't boot and instead you get a blue screen error message or a computer restart. Even if you can get Windows to load into RAM and allow you to access the desktop you might find expected shortcuts to be missing or hard drives and expected programs inaccessible.

There may be other reasons but one common explanation for this behavior is that in newer motherboards the BIOS is set to run the SATA controller in AHCI mode.  This is fine if your operating system is Windows 7 or newer.  However, if the operating system you wish to run is Windows XP or based on it such as a Windows PE or BartPE  run from a boot CD the boot will likely fail unless the boot CD also includes AHCI drivers and possibly other mass storage drivers.  The easiest way to deal with this at least short term is to change the SATA settings in BIOS from AHCI mode to IDE mode.

Conversely if you are trying to boot to a Windows 7 environment and are failing to do so check the BIOS SATA settings to make sure it is in AHCI mode and not IDE mode.

Now that you have entered the Bart pre-install environment with access to hard drives you can use driver injections that you have included on your BartPE CD to load drivers or reset drivers to generic default on the Windows installation on blue screening or restarting hard drive to increase the chances they will also boot.  

How to Boot BartPE Windows XP to RAM Drive

Booting BartPE CD to RAM Instructions

1. Have a copy of Windows XP installation CD or its files on hand.

2. Download PE Builder 3.1.10a and install. PE Builder was built with Windows XP in mind.  If you are installing PE Builder on a later Windows setup such as Windows 7, setupapi.dll from Windows XP needs to be copied to the PE Builder 3110a folder.

3. Obtain Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 versions of RAMDISK.SYS and SETUPLDR.BIN.
The Windows XP version of these files are not the same and will not work.  The two required files can be found in the Windows Server 2003 SP1 download from Microsoft.  Unfortunately it's a ~329MB download package and even though you need only these two small files that it contains you'll need to download the whole thing. The name of the downloaded file as of this writing is WindowsServer2003-KB889101-SP1-ENU.exe. Rename it to something shorter, for example WS2K3.exe, to make it easier to work with if you wish.

Once the package has downloaded DO NOT run it directly.  Doing so may create problems for your operating system. Instead from a command prompt (cmd.exe) maneuver to the directory containing the downloaded package and extract its contents to a safe location with the command

WindowsServer2003-KB889101-SP1-ENU.exe -x

or if you renamed it WS2K3.exe earlier

WS2K3.exe -x

Find RAMDISK.SY_ in the extraction directory and from the command prompt run

expand -r ramdisk.sy_ 

to get RAMDISK.SYS.  Copy the extracted RAMDISK.SYS and SETUPLDR.BIN to a safe location.

4.  Build a BartPE pebuilder.iso file in the regular manner of your choice adding whatever extra plugins or recovery and diagnostic programs you might think useful but replace the RAMDISK.SYS from Windows XP with the one obtained from Windows Server 2003 SP1. Rename the iso file PE.ISO.

5. Create a folder for the RAM-loaded BartPE project such as C:\RAM_PE. Copy both BOOTSECT.BIN from the regular BartPE directory used to create the iso and PE.ISO into the C:\RAM_PE directory. Create an i386 subdirectory inside C:\RAM_PE and copy both the NTDETECT.COM file from the i386 directory of the regular BartPE project and the SETUPLDR.BIN from Windows Server 2003 SP1 into the subdirectory. 

6. Create a WINNT.SIF file in the C:\RAM_PE directory with Notepad with the following content:

[SetupData]
BootDevice = "ramdisk(0)"
BootPath = "\i386\System32\"
OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint /rdexportascd /rdpath=PE.ISO"

After this you should have the following contents and layout in C:\RAM_PE:

C:\RAM_PE
     ---BOOTSECT.BIN
     ---PE.ISO
     ---WINNT.SIF
     ---\i386
          ---NTDETECT.COM
          ---SETUPLDR.BIN

It is important that the file names are upper-cased and follow the 8-character DOS 8.3 format limit for file names.

7. Next step is to create the bootable to RAM iso with mkisofs.exe.  Run a command prompt as an administrator and go to the PE Builder 3110a folder (i.e. the one containing mkisofs.exe). In the command prompt run the following:

mkisofs.exe -force-uppercase -iso-level 4 -volid "BartPE" -A PEBUILDER/MKISOFS -sysid "Win32" -no-emul-boot -b BOOTSECT.BIN -o pe_ram.iso "C:\RAM_PE"

This should create pe_ram.iso.

8. Burn pe_ram.iso to a CD.  You should now have a BartPE CD that can boot to RAM.

9. For it to work as expected, make sure the system's BIOS is set so that SATA control is in IDE mode, not AHCI, and that the system boots from CD ahead of the hard disks and other media.