New Project

While I was helping the Superior Pawnee Computer Society in Nebraska October get their computer refurbishing project off the ground, we needed to build an Image Machine for each of their volunteer workers, so they could work at home during the winter when the snow might make it difficult for them to come to a central refurbishing location. But we did not have enough 8 Gig Hard Drives, so I developed a new machine that provided all of the capabilities of the original Image Machine that we use 99% of the time, and used a much smaller hard drive. The machine I developed in Nebraska has gone through several subsequent revisions. When working in the field one very seldom has a need to come up with a custom configuration of the software on a system (something the full Image Machine could do, but which the machine from Nebraska could not do), but the worker in the field sometimes needs to be able to check something on our HowTo documentation, or he may need some drivers that are not on the Windows CAB files, and he may not have access to the internet to find those drivers. The new Road Warrior design addresses those needs, and an updated Road Warrior B, released in August 2005, added back the capability of installing a custom configuration of the software on a system, so now Road Warrior can do everything the old Image Machine could do, plus several other features it did not have.

How We Did It

When you first boot up Road Warrior it displays this image

Install Ghost Image will transfer an image with an Operating System and installed Application Programs onto the hard disk of the machine being refurbished will allow you to install any of these
Make Floppy Disks (such as Clone 4.1) will make any of the floppy disks we use in our refurbishing project
SYSCHK, to verify the size of the Hard Drive we will be GHOSTing an image to
VALET, so we can see what is on the refurbished computer's Hard Drive
Get harddrive parameters runs MH-IDE, a program that can detect the proper Hard Drive parameters to use
DOS Prompt
Customize Software (Select OS and Application Programs)

If you press "ESC" the Road Warrior will go on into Win98se

The significant icons for Road Warrior are:

Clicking on the Image Machine icon

displays the same seven item menu that was displayed when the computer was first booted.

The only dfference is that SYSCHK will show an error indicating it is being run under Windows, and that some items may not be accurate. However the disk size of Drive 2 should be accurate, and that is the only significant entry that it makes sense to look at in an image machine (SYSCHK is usually run from a Clone disk in the machine being refurbished).

Clicking on the Internet Explorer icon

opens up displaying the Helping Tulsa Computer Refurbishing Procedures, even though the road warrior is not connected to the internet.

Clicking on the Search for Drivers icon

initially displays an instruction page

Pressing any key gives this screen:

Pressing enter to do a text search gives this screen:

As the initial instruction page indicates you need to press the End key, backspace over the last *, and type cmt

Typine in hp as the search string and pressing F10 to run the search results in the following:

Let us assume we were looking for a driver for an HP 890c Printer. It appears it is named Dj885en.exe, and it is in the C:\drivers\d2\Print folder

Clicking on the Copy Drivers icon

gives us this screen. The driver we want is in the d2 so we click on that in the right hand pane,

and then select the Print folder, and select Dj885en.exe. We can then do a right drag (hold the right mouse button down and drag the file) to the D: drive (which is the HD for the machine being refurbished, which is temporarilly in the Drive Tray on the image machine, and when we let the button up select copy.

The Drivers folder

has four subfolders. Folders d1, d2, and d3 are used in conjunction with the search function developed by Gary Ludwig. The don folder has some drivers downloaded by Don Singleton. These drivers do not yet have the cmt files to enable them to be used with the search function, but if the search function does not find a driver, you may want to do a manual search in the don folder, which has subfolders for

dell, gateway, hp, ibm, lexmark, misc, scanner, and nic

We also have a Drivers CD which can be used on the computer being refurbished, assuming it has a CD drive.

Obtain Software

The requirements for the Jerry Award say that we must show where to obtain all of the software we used. This information is documented in the How To files, in other words as each program is described there is a link to either download that program, or to information on how one can find it. The entire Road Warrior can be downloaded here.