A USB Hub that does SATA and eSATA

This USB to SATA/ESATA with 5 USB Ports Combo Hub turns any SATA or eSATA mass storage device into a convenient external USB 2.0 High-Speed drive. This adapter supports 2.5" and 3.5" SATA hard drives, SATA CD/DVD drives and eSATA drive enclosure.

This is great for sysadmins that need to get data off of a hard drive without an external enclosure!



More information is available here.

Creating a bootable USB flash drive for Windows XP using BartPE

A bootable flash drive can come in handy--but trying to create one might have you pulling out your hair. Windows expert Greg Shultz shares the method he followed, from configuring the BIOS to allow the USB port to act as a bootable device to creating a bootable image of Windows XP using the free PE Builder software (and a pair of Windows Server 2003 SP1 files) to formatting and copying the image onto a UFD.

You can check out how to do it here.

It uses BartPE. BartPE will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.

Slipstreaming XP2 into Windows XP Media

OK, I don't see Vista becoming mainstream for a bit, so this seems to be useful.

So I've got Windows XP Pro on a CD. This is the original Windows XP CD no SP1 or SP2. Now, If I want to install Windows XP, I have to go install Windows XP, then two service packs. This can take forever. Microsoft releases all new XP media with the service packs integrated.

What this process does, is takes your original CD and adds SP2 to it.

This process does not use non-microsoft files, so you don't need to worry about it being tainted by spyware, viruses or malware.

You can check out how you make a XP CD into a SP2 CD here.