Thursday, March 25, 2010

Making a bootable pendrive

This following method works for making bootable pen-drive, I have taken it from HERE

1. Insert your USB (4GB+ preferable) stick to the system and backup all the data from the USB as we are going to format the USB to make it as bootable.

2. Open elevated Command Prompt. To do this, type in CMD in Start menu search field and hit Ctrl + Shift + Enter. Alternatively, navigate to Start > All programs >Accessories > right click on Command Prompt and select run as administrator.

3. When the Command Prompt opens, enter the following command:

DISKPART and hit enter.

LIST DISK and hit enter.

Once you enter the LIST DISK command, it will show the disk number of your USB drive. In the below image my USB drive disk no is Disk 1.

4. In this step you need to enter all the below commands one by one and hit enter. As these commands are self explanatory, you can easily guess what these commands do.

SELECT DISK 1 (Replace DISK 1 with your disk number)

CLEAN

CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY

SELECT PARTITION 1

ACTIVE

FORMAT FS=NTFS

(Format process may take few seconds)
ASSIGN

EXIT

Don’t close the command prompt as we need to execute one more command at the next step. Just minimize it.

5. Insert your Windows DVD in the optical drive and note down the drive letter of the optical drive and USB media. Here I use “D” as my optical (DVD) drive letter and “H” as my USB drive letter.

6. Go back to command prompt and execute the following commands:

D:CD BOOT and hit enter. Where “D” is your DVD drive letter.

CD BOOT and hit enter and write BOOTSECT.EXE/NT60 H:

(Where “H” is your USB drive letter)

You will get message "Successfully updated NTFS file system bootcode". and "Bootcode was successfully updated on all targeted volumes."

7. Copy Windows DVD contents to USB.

You are done with your bootable USB. You can now use this bootable USB as bootable DVD on any computer that comes with USB boot feature (most of the current motherboards support this feature).

Note that this bootable USB guide will not work if you are trying to make a bootable USB on XP computer.

Learning Programing Fast Track

I found this really cool stuff on net surfing for the web tutorials for learning programing at fast pace. If you are a starter the basic things you are going to need is to learn C, that's the basic and mother of all the language as far as we all believe. The logic in C applies everywhere. So knowing C is a great help for learning programing.

The things that you are going to need is:
  1. A computer ( I am sure you have it, you don't you can beg, buy or steal, ok don't steal until you can get by other methods)
  2. A text editor (from notepad to vim, you can use anything, here are few that you can try, those are neat enough, EditPlus, Notepad++, Vi/Vim (available for Windows too, there are video tutorial to learn vim), or another that you are comfortable with.
  3. An IDE, there are many, you don't need an IDE if you can get a compiler working for you. IDE makes your work easy. (i.e TurboC, Codeblocks, Microsoft Visual C++ and Komodo)
  4. Resources for learning programing (Books, web tutorial, videos etc...)
Ok!!! Here's something for people on fast track learning, I was looking for good programing Videos and I have found some. This web page gives access to I think very cool interesting videos, http://academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science, for those who are into programing, I think this is one good place to learn. Lectures directly from finest universities. Personally, I am watching Mehran Sahami and Richard Buckland Videos and finding them very very interesting. Richard Buckland videos are not there on this link, but I guess you can find them, they are available just ask Google. And ya, how can I forget http://www.learnerstv.com/course.php?cat=Computers Learnerstv.com . They have some good collection of videos not only on computer science but on a vast variety of subjects.