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ok heres my experiences with installing Longhorn.

downloaded the file in 1hr @ 200 K/sec from Irc. (not saying where, so dont ask)

burnt the .iso to cd, went perfectly.

thought "u beaut!" and then proceeded to make a backup of the .iso to my harddrive using isobuster. this again worked no problems.

so yes, i thought to myself ok this is goin well, might install it now... so i bunged in the cd, and autorun started, so i clicked on "install longhorn". yay! it asked if i wanted to install a fresh copy, or upgrade, i wanted to keep my settings etc, so i clicked upgrade.... copied files from the cd.... then rebooted..

weee was goin excellent so far i thought!

rebooted, started the install program, then stopped.

"please insert your Windows XP Profressional CD then press Enter to continue"

WTF?

I put in the XP cd, pressed enter, it copied files... hm strange i thought.... stopped.

"file idwlog.blah missing, continue, retry, exit"

WTF?

ok ill click retry, maby the cd is hot... nup, same msg... hmmm clicked continue... more files copied from the cd.... stopped.

more files missing!

arrrghhh, pressed esc bout 402340924890 times to continue installing... doesnt help...

files are missing, ALOT OF FILES...

exited the setup

rebooted

no OS.

great... fresh reinstall of XP...

tried again using the setup from the hard disk

same deal..

guys, i suggest you DONT download this just yet... files are missing, and its a poopter trying to reinstall your configs from backups...

soo heres what i say in summery

its all good until you click "setup"

:angry:

Mate you did it wrong, check out when u use the setup options to make sure you set it to Copy all files across during installation, otherwise yes you WILL get that error :/

bug:

i get this error:

"an error occured copying file 31x5lc04.dll.mui to C:\$WIN_NT.~LS\I386\31x5lc04.dll.mui.

The file is missing, contact your system admin"

retry, skip file, exit setup."

me thinks i got a shonky copy of the file... it was from #betas...

so if your in queue to get it, DONT. its a poophouse copy it seems

ok heres my experiences with installing Longhorn.

downloaded the file in 1hr @ 200 K/sec from Irc. (not saying where, so dont ask)

burnt the .iso to cd, went perfectly.

thought "u beaut!" and then proceeded to make a backup of the .iso to my harddrive using isobuster. this again worked no problems.

so yes, i thought to myself ok this is goin well, might install it now... so i bunged in the cd, and autorun started, so i clicked on "install longhorn". yay! it asked if i wanted to install a fresh copy, or upgrade, i wanted to keep my settings etc, so i clicked upgrade.... copied files from the cd.... then rebooted..

weee was goin excellent so far i thought!

rebooted, started the install program, then stopped.

"please insert your Windows XP Profressional CD then press Enter to continue"

WTF?

I put in the XP cd, pressed enter, it copied files... hm strange i thought.... stopped.

"file idwlog.blah missing, continue, retry, exit"

WTF?

ok ill click retry, maby the cd is hot... nup, same msg... hmmm clicked continue... more files copied from the cd.... stopped.

more files missing!

arrrghhh, pressed esc bout 402340924890 times to continue installing... doesnt help...

files are missing, ALOT OF FILES...

exited the setup

rebooted

no OS.

great... fresh reinstall of XP...

tried again using the setup from the hard disk

same deal..

guys, i suggest you DONT download this just yet... files are missing, and its a poopter trying to reinstall your configs from backups...

soo heres what i say in summery

its all good until you click "setup"

:angry:

yes the blokes who made the nfo are idiots, you have to extract the cd to a folder on your hdd

and install it from their, do upgrade only :)

no your not listening to me, you cant install from the CD, you have to extract the contents to a folder on your root hdd,

then run the install and do upgrade, it will install, 1/2 - 3/4s way into the install you might get a file error, just click cancel and it should be ok

no your not listening to me, you cant install from the CD, you have to extract the contents to a folder on your root hdd,

then run the install and do upgrade, it will install, 1/2 - 3/4s way into the install you might get a file error, just click cancel and it should be ok

Yes for an upgrade its not the best idea to run from CD but i can't understand why anyone would want to upgrade?

Surely you just make a new partition with partition magic or something and install longhorn with the CD as a "New Installation" using the options I have shown in the pic. That way you can truely tell if Longhorn is any good

still same error messages, files missing.

thanks anyway guys, but it seems like the file i have is corrupt or things were taken out on purpose.

File Information: [File Name: Microsoft.Longhorn.Build.3683.ISO ? File Size: 529.66MB ? 529 MB (555,393,024 bytes) ? Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC): AD89AB31]

Size on disk: 529 MB (555,425,792 bytes)

I had .net on drive c: and xp pro on drive d:

I extracted the iso to a folder d:/LH and ran the set up. I choose new installation, and then set it to go to temp /windows and prompt me for formating options.

It copied the setup files, and then rebooted. I then was able to format from the longhorn extracted iso, drive c: and installed to it.

The install went fine. A command prompt window pops up and does additional little things, no errors till the end. The error logged said all was installed OK, but a few files weren't signed by microsoft.

Then Longhorn did its new little set up, the only thing new is the music. After it was all set it detected both and did proper dual boot menu.

Longhorn works pretty well. Turning off WFS and not using the side bar keeps things smooth.

IE 6.5 will crash whenever you download a file from the web. You need to destroy as much of IE 6.5 as you can and make the reg adjustments so you can install IE6, or install another browser such as Phoenix.

Some of the new ideas in this build don't work, as they need some registry toying. One of which is the calendar view under pivot points in the explorer menu of any folder.

Setting your folders to a default list or icon view also helps keep speeds smooth. The side search bar in all the folders also only works when WFS is running.

Sygate firewalls will not run on Longhorn. Not sure about others, as I haven't tested any besides sygate.

There are a number of small enhancements that make it usable.

In some screen-shots you see a photos folder with a top heading with a picture of a girl.

The folder start-pages such as this are not complete, and microsoft has merely added mock up images. The icons under here such as "burn dvd" are not actual icons or functional, but rather just pics.

The my contacts folder in the start-menu is also in operable.

In all if you just want to see what possible new ideas might make it into Longhorn, give alpha build 3683 a try. If you have patience and spend time overhauling some parts and tweaking it, then it could be used daily.

But this alpha is more one for your OS collection. Some of the avalon components are neat code wise.

If your serious about OS's technology and design, get a hold of a copy and have a good long hard look trough it, as its obviously Microsoft's first step and yields some interesting ideas.

No doubt though Longhorn will change as the builds continue to update un-till it eventually hits gold.

i have the iso burnt and everything, and i'm going to use this buggy thing just like i used the buggy old xp, and upgrade through the leaks. as of now, i read the longhorn for noobs thing on xbetas, and says something about changing it to be a boot disk? is this not already bootable? i'm backin up my must have files and will reformat, and i'm expecting to do a clean install? any final warnings or bits of advice?

:no: yea its not worth the trouble, only do it if ur gonna format anyway cause i found it to be .... crap i know its a prealpha and all but ouch

i've been needing to reformat, less than a gig left. i think i'll try LH out, and if it ****es me off enough i'll format and install XP. will i have any trouble trying to format and installing XP over Longhorn? will it give me the same error i got when i put win 98 cd in with xp installed? saying i have a newer version of windows or whatever.

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Setup BIOS The F4-425 Pro includes an Aptio BIOS from American Megatrends [1, 2], and you can setup pretty much everything here including the boot order, which is locked to the UEFI OS, however above that choice you can enable or disable booting to the USB bootloader so this would still allow you to switch to a USB stick with an alternative bootloader and boot from it, or disable it to instead always start from the first disk with an OS installed on it. Initial Setup Setup is roughly the same as the F4-425 Plus, along with the new TOS 7 setup dialogs, so there will be no surprises here. Upon connecting to the LAN and booting up, the F4-425 Pro can be reached by navigating to http://tnas.local. If that doesn't work, you can use the local address assigned via DHCP, which you can find using the TNAS PC desktop application, which is essentially a TerraMaster NAS finder. The setup process is pretty straightforward, through a wizard, and in full below: TOS 7 Initialization As you can see, TOS 7 received a new coat of paint, and the initialization requires fewer interactions. Happily, TOS no longer decides to throw all disks into the same Storage Pool; 2.5-inch HDDs are allocated into Storage Pool 1. This is because two of the HDDs are allocated to hold system files. Previously (with TOS 5 and 6), if you pre-installed HDDs and SSDs, they were all placed into Storage Pool 1, even if you did not select the SSDs for inclusion during the onboarding. TOS 7 Setup On first boot, there is a tutorial and some steps to take to harden the TNAS (or not), which includes an immediate update from TOS 7.0.0616 to 7.0.0706, of which the changelog screenshot is also included in the above gallery. It must be noted that the Security Advisor still contains (in my opinion) a pretty major bug in that if you enable SPC and then do the required rebooting, the Security Advisor still says that SPC is disabled. TerraMaster provided the following statement about it: It is disappointing that TOS 7 has been in beta since December, and this OOBE issue is still there. Shutdown option has moved Instead of a Taskbar option to manage the NAS, all of these options have been moved to a "Start panel", initially I didn't see it and my contact had to show me how to power off the F4-425 Pro. To logout, reboot or power off you can find those controls at the top right of the Panel. It is also possible to power off through the TNAS mobile app beta. Storage setup Above, you can see the steps I took to create the Storage Pools and Volumes. I made a second Storage Pool using TRAID on two 4TB MP44Q SSDs (which, in this instance, is similar to RAID 5), and finally, I added the 250GB 970 Evo Plus drive as Hyper Cache on Storage Pool 1 in Balanced mode. Registering If you decide not to lock down the F4-425 Pro in Security Isolation Mode (blocking all external connections), then you could set up a TNAS device ID through the Remote Access setting in the Control Panel (which must be unique). This works in combination with an online TerraMaster account. TOS 7 TNAS Online Creating a TerraMaster account and linking the device online activates the warranty when you provide proof of purchase and the serial number, but it also gives you access through the TNAS mobile app, which allows you to complete certain operationsб including powering off and restarting the NAS remotely. A TNAS mobile update is required to gain access through TOS 7, and this is provided on the TerraMaster website, as it is not yet on Google Play. The app is evolving all the time and has made leaps and bounds since I first started reviewing TerraMaster devices almost three years ago. It is not quite there yet if you are comparing the likes of Synology, which, sadly, a lot of users online do all the time. OpenClaw setup One of the main selling points of the new F4-425 Pro is the inclusion of OpenClaw, with TerraMaster claiming that it is "powered by the world's first AI-native TOS 7 OS, supporting local-first smart workflows and independent data control." However, I immediately ran into problems trying to enable OpenClaw. After waiting 20 minutes at the "Enabling" message of the OpenClaw app following installation, I decided to do some searching online and discovered that it couldn't complete the installation process due to SPC being enabled, which is something TOS 7 immediately recommends to be enabled on first boot. SPC for NAS (TOS 7) is basically the same principle as UAC in Windows; it blocks executables from being launched by non-Super Users. After reaching out to my contact about these issues, I received the following response: Anyway, this only became clear when I closed the OpenClaw app screen and clicked on the OpenClaw icon in the taskbar; that is when I saw the message about disabling SPC. I think, due to the fact that this is a requirement, this should be a prompt during the installation process, not when closing the App Market and then trying to launch OpenClaw. There's also no 'Getting started' guide for people like me who have never used OpenClaw. I tried to add an LLM and discovered the tutorial led nowhere. That's when I started looking around the official TerraMaster forums, and I found a guide that helpfully explains that you won't get anywhere with OpenClaw unless you have a paid plan, which is disappointing because I imagined there would be an option to use a local LLM as I do in SubtitleEdit with Whisper-XXL. In addition, with the marketing imagery on the official site, it says that the OpenClaw feature is "all processed 100% locally for absolute privacy." which led me to believe that I could install a local LLM, not one that required paid tokens. In any case, TerraMaster does not provide guidance for this new feature, which was also a selling point of the F4-425 Pro! My contact also provided clarification about the above points I raised with TerraMaster Since it is not in the scope of the review to add paid services, I'll leave that to the people who are more qualified with OpenClaw. F4-425 Pro Surveillance App TOS also comes with a Surveillance app, which is not installed by default; it can be found in the App Market recommended section. In addition, after installing, it doesn't drop a shortcut on the Desktop or top taskbar, but you can "Send to Desktop" from the App Market listing for the app for a quick way to open it. Adding my Reolink POE doorbell camera was painless. TerraMaster doesn't appear to have a repository of preconfigured cameras; instead, the camera must be added using ONVIF or RTSP. No mobile Surveillance app TerraMaster still doesn't have a dedicated Surveillance app, although from searching online, Surveillance can be used and managed through the TNAS mobile app. I tried this with the updated TNAS mobile app beta in combination with TOS 7 and got a message that Surveillance was "Only accessible through web browser," so I reckon this must be limited to the stable versions of TOS 6 and the mobile app. More quirks In addition, whenever I minimized the Live View window in the browser Surveillance app, the feed appeared to switch to the Low-bandwidth stream, and there was no way to get the High-quality stream back. To get the High-quality stream back, I had to close Live View and then reopen it. Benchmarking A pretty cool feature of the TOS 7 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD. In order to do that, you would have to leave out any HDDs during initialization, and even then, the system partitions are always written to two HDDs when they are eventually added. With three NVMe slots, this also gives an interesting scenario where you could build a TRAID storage Pool for installing all your apps and Docker on, and keep the third for SSD cache on the HDD pool. Limitless options! SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges. Although the read result on SATA was a little less than with the F4-425 Plus, for some reason, while writes were generally better. SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that. TOS 7, which, as of testing, is still in Beta, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F4-425 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core N350 CPU and its 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app. It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan (which was a little annoying) when the disks were not actively copying or reading data. Conclusion So what have I learned? Unfortunately, this release raises a few important questions and concerns that I feel haven't been adequately addressed. What I didn't like Our variant shipped with TOS 7 beta, and it's advised not to use it in a production environment. I feel that's a bit limiting on an $800 device. The mobile app is also still in beta and does not support some of the first-party apps, like Surveillance, and it still has quite a few bugs. I am a bit confused about the OpenClaw marketing along with the F4-425 Pro. I feel like that if it's going to be a main selling point, then offer official guidance on how to get started with it. TerraMaster recommends enabling SPC, but then markets the NAS for use with OpenClaw, which requires disabling SPC to be able to use it, opening up genuine security concerns for the NAS; and that's before you get into the security concerns of OpenClaw itself. Of course, the above issues won't be a problem if you decide to install something else on it, or even go back to the stable TOS 6. I wish TerraMaster had just given TOS 7 as opt-in rather than shipping with it. TOS 7 has been available as a preview since December 2025 (so well before my last TerraMaster review), and according to a thread on Reddit where a user shared a screenshot from the TerraMaster Facebook page, it is scheduled to launch today, June 23, but there's nothing about that in the TerraMaster news blog. My contact confirmed over email that TOS 7 exits beta today. The rubber feet also deserve a mention as they continue to be a problem, with them coming unstuck the moment you shift the F4-425 Pro anywhere on your desk. What I liked What it comes down to, though, aside from what I already mentioned, you are still getting a quality, affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, backup your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device that will certainly futureproof you for some time. It provides good performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Four bays afford proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link. Considering the 2024 releases were more about power, with the likes of an Intel Core i5-1235U high-end laptop CPU under the hood, I asked my contact last time if we could expect more of the same in higher-end models and was told: It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N350 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the F4-425 Pro is intended for, media streaming and backup. The only downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. Along with the other things I mentioned, it all ends up costing it a couple of points. If you are comfortable with the command line, Docker, and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. In TOS, the apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected.\ AI NAS?! What has become clear to me this year is that we are going to start seeing all kinds of "AI NAS" come to market, and while that might be good for us consumers, be diligent and research these claims. Although the F4-425 Pro technically comes with AI, it is really using a cloud service that is externally sourced off-device through the third party OpenClaw app. My colleague did review a newcomer to the NAS space earlier this year, and it includes a local AI assistant inside the Zettlab D4 NAS, and they do not even use AI in the product name, check out Chris' review here. Where to buy and a discount coupon However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster is having a 20% off launch discount, plus you can also still apply our unique 10% off coupon on checkout, which only works on the official website. So here is a breakdown of the pricing that is only valid on the official TerraMaster website. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $575.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $503.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £525.59 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £460.79 Use NEOWIN coupon code during checkout for 10% discount Over on Amazon US and UK, the F4-425 Pro also gets a 20% launch discount, but here, the above 10% coupon cannot be applied. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for $639.99 at Amazon US (was $799.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for $559.99 at Amazon US (was $699.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for £583.99 at Amazon UK (was £729.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for £511.99 at Amazon UK (was £639.99) As an Amazon Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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