Hi, GREAT progress! When all else fails print out the printable instructions and check off everything stepwise. I did, burned the resultant iso at 8x with the Nero 5.5 that came bundled with my Liteonit Combo DVD/DC-RW. it booted, established broadband network connection. I tried to update AdAware as a verification exercise, which of course it can't on the CD, but did get the failure popups to verify the connection dialog.

Now. How can one use Firefox? It can't establish a cache on the CD, obviously. I can't get it to boot at all, no way, no how, to set up dynamic files on an HDD. Is one supposed to configure all that in the pre-build file, and set up a Firefox cache on another working hdd?

Next, is there any reason I can't include a W2K recovery console with a clean registry backup as a plugin of my own? Any suggestions? I'm totally impressed and encouraged! Thanks

Actually AdAware should update....it's run from the ram drive, so it's updateable. I'll have to check into that more.

Sorry about FF, we are working on a new beta right now with several fixes for 2.55. The most simple fix is to run FF, close it, and then run it again....it should work. If you want to, you could visit the forum for UBCD4Win and download the fixed plugin for FF.

Not sure about recovery console. Although, you could easily create a plugin to add files that you want to include in your build. That might be a good addition to the project!! I could create a basic plugin called "my files", a user could then navigate to that folder and drop files into the "files" folder there. Then enable the plugin so those files will be in a "my files" folder on the CD!

I'm glad you are impressed with the project, we have been working very hard on it for the past 1 1/2 years!! In the future though I suggest you please post your questions, etc. in the UBCD4Win forum. There are many regular visitors to the forum and they will be glad to help!!

Hmmm, sorry to squash your idea and my enthusiasm about it...but I thought of a better alternative.

It would actually be better for you to keep a backup on your HDD. I have thought about this a lot after my post. You should be able to read your HDD when booted into the project. You could then use one of the "explorers" to navigate to your file and then restore it. If the disc is unreadable...then there is no reason to have a backup of the registry, because you will probably need a new disc and have to reinstall 2K anyways.

So just make regular backups of your registry and keep them somewhere you will remember. Please of course comment on my idea if you don't think it would work or be a good one.

Aha. I FORGOT about the ramdisk! It hasn't been discussed much. Does Firefox put its cache there too? What else runs there? Everything 1 at a time? Is that discussed on any forum? I have 1.5 gigs of RAM so thats a lot of potential

As long as W2K os disk can be accessed from the UBCD it would be much more straightforward just to copy a clean registry from within the W2K os over a corrupt one, rather than go to the trouble of building in a recovery console just for that. I keep a clean registry in a 2d repair folder in WINNT just for that, because I usually delete all the autosaved registry backups when I do serious security sweeps. The clean registry has all software installed, has been regcleaned, and all streams erased. I was thinking of including recovery console not just to be able to install a backup registry, but because it has so many W2K specific recovery gadgets, it seems very desirable to have it as part of my own particular PE trick-bag.

I'll take yr advice and post in the UBCD2Win forum from now on