Well, me and my mouth!

It all failed when I tried to run it from my portable drive, on a Vista box.   It seems Peg can't find the one and only user, as it's asking all the configuration questions you have to go through on a (normal) first install.

I did launch winpm-32 with the -roam option.   It seems Vista obviously does things differently.

I'll have more info later, no time right now.

Dave.

Hi.

After some local personal computer hassle (exploding PSU's!)  I moved my install of Pegasus to another PC, lock stock and all.   A simple bulk copy of the entire folder structure etc, via usb stick was done.

Much to my delight (but not surprise, Peg is always good to me in this respect) it all burst into life, and I could get on with things.

In the process of all this, I updated to V4.62, and was much impressed with the changes, not least the greatly improoved stability, but that could also be as much as it's now living on XP, not W2k?  I digress....

However, I've decided I'd realy like to have it all on an external USB connected hard drive (FLASH sticks wear out unexpectedly I've found) so I can move "My" email system between PC's as I need.  If nothing else, a pocket sized drive, is a lot easier to carry arround...

I understand from recent posts, that there is a -roam option, but unless I'm dim (always possible) I can't seem to find anything about that.

What I've tried so far, is manualy editing all the .ini files so that C:\PMAIL......  is now O:\PMAIL...... etc, also the desktop shortcut properties etc, and even the registry entries, though I find that Peg seems to update or recreate what it needs quetly in the background.   Paths to the image cache, and windows noises etc, are left as is.

However, when starting Peg, I get the "user not found on this system" message, even manually entering my known good username, does not work.  Whatever I do, does not seem to change that, so, and flame me for this if it's under my nose, how/what to use to allow me to do such a thing?

The portable drive in question is a 20G hard drive, with a TrueCrypt (V7.1) volume, that always appears as O:\  ('P' would have been nice, but one machine I would probably use, already has that drive allocated to a network store.)   TrueCrypt itself, is not "installed", but is runable from a small (1G) unencrypted volume on the portable drive.  The passphrase is a suitably obscure (non dictionary item) known only to me.  This is just to protect myself, if I loose the drive, or one of it's backups.

I've found in the past, that 20G drives are large enough to do serious stuff on, but small enough to backup easily.   I imagine I may need to setup some system variables perhaps, to make this easy?

OK, flame suit on, and sick bucket ready.

Regards.

Dave Baxter.

> I understand from recent posts, that there is a -roam option, but unless

I'm dim (always possible)
> I can't seem to find anything about that.

 All this does is tell Pegasus Mail to ignore the drive letter and look to the current drive using the path set in the pmail.cfg file.  For example, if you install to o:\pmail where the mailboxes are located in o:\pmail\mail\<username> then Pegasus Mail on startup will look locally for the mailbox directory no matter what the current drive letter mapping.  Here's the info from the help.

 -ROAM  This option tells Pegasus Mail that it should ignore the configured drive letter when locating user mailboxes and mail files, and should instead use the drive letter of the drive from which WINPM-32.EXE was run. If Pegasus Mail and your mailbox directories are located on the same physical drive, you should always use this option. -ROAM greatly simplifies running the program on Peer-to-Peer and non-NetWare networks, because it allows the same copy of the program to be run no matter what drive letter mappings exist on the particular workstation where it runs. This switch also allows you to install a complete, working copy of Pegasus Mail, complete with mailboxes, onto a memory stick, and to use that memory stick in any computer where it is subsequently plugged. You must not use this switch if Pegasus Mail and your mailbox directories cannot be accessed using the same drive letter. This switch is ignored and has no effect in either Novell NetWare operating mode.

Thanks Thomas.

It does make sense, a little.  My problem is I can't see the wood for the trees in front of me.   I tried searching the Help within Peg', but there seems to be no search facility.  Is the drop down item under the 'Help' menu "Using Help" suposed to do something?  On this system, nothing appears.

Anyway...  Using your skill and judgement, if I modify the desktop shortcut so that the "target" is 'O:\PMAIL\winpm-32.exe -roam' and the "start in" path is 'O:\PMAIL', will that do what I'd like, with no ill effects, and no need to edit .ini files or hack reg' entries?

The pmail.cfg file, appears not to be an editable text file.  A C:\PMAIL path is in there (not O:, and twice) but with an awful lot of non printable bytes too.   Is it safe to edit, or what tool to use?

Would launching Peg from a batchfile (on O:\) be a better bet, as I could take into account the subtle differences between W2k, XP, Vista, and (not that I have one) Win7 ?

Sorry for all the numbnutz quesitons, but I'd just like it to work, idealy without loosing the address lists, etc and so forth, and ater many attempts at trying to do this, the faded grey cell is, er, somewhat more faded.

I think I've been dragged down to the level of some of the customers I have to work with, I'm sure I could have figured all this out in a trice some years back.

Time for bed now, I need it I think.

Thanks for your time.

Dave.

[quote user="Dave4x4"]

Thanks Thomas.

It does make sense, a little.  My problem is I can't see the wood for the trees in front of me.   I tried searching the Help within Peg', but there seems to be no search facility.  Is the drop down item under the 'Help' menu "Using Help" suposed to do something?  On this system, nothing appears.

Anyway...  Using your skill and judgement, if I modify the desktop shortcut so that the "target" is 'O:\PMAIL\winpm-32.exe -roam' and the "start in" path is 'O:\PMAIL', will that do what I'd like, with no ill effects, and no need to edit .ini files or hack reg' entries?

 [/quote]

 Depends where winpm-32.exe is. If its in O:\Pmail\Programs the short cut will need to reflect that.  Using the -ROAM option as you have displayed it is correct and should work OK.

> Is the drop down item under the 'Help' menu "Using Help" supposed to do something?  On this system, nothing appears.

Strange, this does not work, I'll pass that to David.  But in any case Help | Command line options tells you all about the -ROAM option and Help |  Help index lets you look through the help.

Hallo Thomas,

in my german PM461 a error pops up (translated):

The file WinHlp32.hlp could not be found. Do you want to search on it for your own? (YES - NO)

This file indeed doesn't exist - even in german version (due to "normal" syntax of filenames in Pegasus, this for shure is no german helpfile)

bye   Olaf

Thank you Sir, and Thomas for the insight.

After bulk copying all the contents of the C:\PMAIL folder and sub-folders to O:\PMAIL,  Renaming C:\PMAIL to C:\PMAIL-x (as a backup!)   Then changing the desktop shortcut to reflect that it needs to point to 'O:\PMAIL\winpm-32.exe -roam' and start in 'O:\PMAIL'

It all seems to be up and working just as I wish, also Peg has updated the background registry entries to reflect this change.

Very many thanks people, I'd been poking about trying to do this for a couple of weeks on and off, so for me it's a great result.

I did try the batch file route, it works OK, but there is a cmd line window left open doing that.  I know there are ways to hide that, but it's just resorces used for no need as it turns out.

Anyway, job done, as far as I can tell.[:D]  I now have a portable Pegasus.  Magic!   And if I do something silly and loose the disk, all the finder gets, is a copy of TrueCrypt, and a large file of random noise!   Now to tell my backup program to monitor this, and dribble the changes to the archive.

Thanks again.

Dave Baxter.