Khalifah Shabazz

I made an important discovery today, that not all USB ports on your USB 2.0 motherboard actually operate at USB 2.0 (high) speed. Yes, it’s true! Even tough I build computers, I automatically assumed that when a motherboard manufacturer specified USB 2.0 on the box, that meant all the ports on the board could operate at high-speed (480Mbsp) as oppose to full-speed (12Mbps), better known as USB 1.1. Which is a huge difference. I know now that my initial assumption was WRONG!

This revelation came to me after I bought a USB 2.0 flash drive to enable Windows 7 ready-boost; just until I’m ready to reinstall the OS after I upgrade from 2GB DDR3 to 4GB of faster DDR3 RAM in the next coming months. I figured this would be a small, cheap boost in performance that should tied me over ’til then. Much to my surprise after connecting the PNY USB 2.0 flash drive to a port on the back of my PC, Windows 7 popped up a message indicating I can increase performance by plugging the USB drive into a high-speed port. This was opposed the the one I’d current plugged it into, which it could only operate at 12Mbps. I was baffled but not surprised. Those dirty manufacturers put more USB 1.1 ports than 2.0 ports on this Biostar motherboard. Windows 7 also presented me with a list of valid USB 2.0 HUBs along with their available ports. But that list was useless, as there was no way to determine where those ports were physically on the PC. After plugging the drive into many different ports, I was confused as to which were actually USB 2.0 compliant, until I figures out a way to tell in the windows device manager.

1. Open the Windows Device manager by right-clicking “Computer” in the start menu or desktop.

2. In Device manager, expand the “Universal Serial Bus Controllers” then right-click any “USB Root Hub” and select “Properties” from the context menu.

3. Click the “Advanced” tab and you should see hub information, which should indicate either high-speed/full-speed.

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The only problem is determining which of these hubs maps to a physical hub on the motherboard, which was a guess for me. But you could also look at the “Details” tab, select “Physical Device Object Name”, the value of that should provide the root hub number, which should match the number printed next to the USB connection on the mother board.

Pretty slow day today, no excitement, it’s dreary outside, and not much happened at work. The highlight of my day was when I had to manually add an entry to a windows 7 boot loader in order to dual boot to Windows. Here are the instructions to do so:

Note: you need to include the curly braces around the GUID.

1. Open up a command console in elevated mode.

2. Use the export command to make a backup before making any changes to the BCD store (Boot manager), for example:
bcdedit /export "E:\BCD Backup"

3. Type bcdedit in a command prompt to see a list of GUIDs.

4. Use this command to copy an existing operating system entry to a new entry and give it a name; I named it “Windows Vista” since that is the OS I want to load. This command will also return a new GUID which you will need for the rest of the commands:
bcdedit /copy {GuidToCopy} /d “Windows Vista”

5. Update the partition information for the new entry (using the GUID) by specifying the drive that contains the OS you want to load (replace x with the appropriate drive letter):
bcdedit /set {NewGuid} device partition=x:
bcdedit /set {NewGuid} osdevice partition=x:

6. Use the following command to display the new entry and make it the last entry on the boot menu (list of operating systems you will see when you turn the PC on) by entering:
bcdedit /displayorder {NewGuid} /addlast

Scenario which required the need to do so:

I had a laptop with Windows Vista installed on one of the two hard drives. I removed the drive with Vista installed on in, and proceeded to install Windows 7 Enterprise on the remaining empty drive.  When I was done installing windows 7 and set it up to my liking, I then placed the drive with Vista installed back in the laptop. Now I needed to add an entry in the Windows 7 boot loader for Vista, since windows 7 did NOT get to do it auto-magically during its installation.  Actually, Windows 7 would have left the Vista boot loader in place and added an entry for itself, which is NOT what I wanted. Removing the Vista drive allowed Windows 7 to create a separate boot partition, which is what I did want. Anyway, manually adding an entry to the boot loader is simple, but most might not like using the console.

You can find much more detail at Boot Configuration Data Editor Frequently Asked Questions

Today once again, I am going to perform what can be a tricky task of moving the windows 7 User folder to another partition. You can also move it to a completely separate drive with the same steps, there’s nothing special you need to do for that. It’s rather simple, just 3 easy commands. Sorry, no GUI for this I know of all has to be done from the command line; preferably while booting from the DVD and using SHIFT+F10 to access the command line. Here are those commands you’ll need to type in (Note: the drive letters are different when you’re booting from the DVD):

• Windows7 drive letter = Drive with windows folder, this is usually the D: drive when booting from DVD.
• Drive moving users to = D: when booting from HDD, and E: when booting from DVD.

robocopy (Windows7 drive letter):\Users (Drive moving users to):\Users /mir /xj
rmdir /S /Q (Windows7 drive letter):\Users
mklink /J (Windows7 driver letter):\Users (Drive moving users to, when booting from HDD):\Users

Example:

robocopy D:\Users E:\Users /mir /xj
rmdir /S /Q D:\Users
mklink /J D:\Users D:\Users

The last line is NOT a typo. This is because the drive will become the D: drive when I remove the DVD, and reboot the system as normal. If you mess this up, it can be hard to fix.

You can find the details on how to perform this maneuver by reading the answer to the question “Mount second drive as C:\Users in Windows 7 ” posted over at superuser.com.

There are two distinct problems with this approach however:

1. You get unwanted OS specific files and cache data, that is normally stored in each users AppData, and other folders.

2. You will notice that you cannot download files in IE (only tested 8 on windows 64-bit) after performing this process.

I’m not aware of the best way to handle either of these cases. If anyone has a suggestions, then I’d like to here it.