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5th grade teacher - need help to bypass windows SystemCed problem - use TC?

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tinypoodle:
Do I understand right that you plan alternatingly booting TC & Win2K without any user interaction?

samJohn:
Yes that is what we do now - one student comes in, turns on all computers and 4 minutes later, each laptop is ready for the student to begin their lessons.  They click on their name, enter their password, and my program starts where they left off yesterday.  Except once or twice a week, a student gets that systeced error and they have to move to a different computer until I get time to fix it.  That is why I need something before W2k starts to copy my good "system" file over the existing one (even if it is good) so that if the system file is corrupted (or in our case, always goes from 8,900 KB to 13,xxx therefore exceeding the mem that W2k can use for their hives.)  I'm not sure why it increases in size as no student can install hardware devices or access any part of the system including IE or file system.

Rich:
Hi samJohn
I think you should try to figure out why the registries system file is so large to begin with and why it's getting bigger.
If you already haven't done so:
Try using  RegScanner:
http://www.nirsoft.net/articles/find_registry_large_values.html
Check for any entries that seem to be excessive in size. If you go to the tips section listed here:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/regscanner.html
they state:

--- Quote ---view the list of all Registry keys that have been modified in the last few hours or days
--- End quote ---
When a machine goes south, that may allow you to identify the culprit.
You might also want to Google   registry compact    to reduce the size by removing the empty space
left behind by keys that were deleted.
OK, having said all that, here is a rough overview of how you might automate the process:
Copy the "good  system file to  E:\winnt\system32\config\system.good
Copy  boot.ini  to  boot.windows. Edit it to include an entry for Tinycore.
Copy  boot.windows  to  boot.tinycore. Edit it to default to the Tinycore partition.
Defrag the drive on the laptop to ensure there is empty space at the end of the drive.
Boot the CorePlus CD and using the Apps tool, get the  gparted, ntfsprogs  extensions
Shrink the partition to make room for another one, 100MB should be plenty.
Use the install utility to install Tinycore to the new partition.
Reboot the CorePlus CD and using the Apps tool install  ntfsprogs  into the new partition.
Edit the  /opt/bootlocal.sh  file to do the following:

--- Code: ---1. Mount the drive containing boot.ini
2. Copy  boot.windows  to  boot.ini
3. Mount the drive containing  system
4. Copy  system.good  to  system
5. reboot

--- End code ---
Click on the  Exit  icon, select  Reboot, make sure  Backup Options  is set to  Backup  and the text box underneath
points to your new partition. Click OK.
When Windows comes up, create a batch file that copies  boot.tinycore  to  boot.ini. Run the batch file. Then set it
to run automatically every time Windows boots.
Since you list drive E: and I don't know whether C:, D: and E: are partitions on the same drive or different drives,
I can't offer any suggestions on how they map to Linux drives.
As I said, this is a rough overview and no doubt will require some tweaking. Hope it helps.

tinypoodle:
Sounds like a plan! :D

The one thing I don't understand is how TC could be booted or bootstrapped via boot.ini, if you'd care to elaborate a bit more in detail about that.

lverns:
@tinypoodle
    I'd suggest grub4dos. In theory, you only need to drop two files onto drive C: (a binary file named 'grldr' and a config file named 'menu.lst') and then add something like this to boot.ini

--- Quote ---C:\grldr="Grub4Dos"
--- End quote ---
Sadly, my experience with such a setup has been rather poor, but that would be one possible route to pursue. Still, grub4dos is my favorite bootloader.

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