Re: How workable is Vista?

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:44:41 GMT, Jonathan Kirwan
<jkirwan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:04:19 +0000, Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan wrote:

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:55:24 +0000, Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan wrote:

My business model has me using a separate hard disk for each client
and just racking it in when I work. This absolutely guarantees that a
system crash or hard disk failure will not impact any other client's
work. Microsoft's operating systems, up through perhaps Win2000,
supported this -- I don't need to call Microsoft to get a new ID every
time I set up a new hard disk for a new client -- but the rest do not,
so I use them... sparingly. But I do have a few purchased machines
where I do keep WinXP loaded, where I'm forced to use tools that will
no longer run on the older OS. (Though I also keep a large number of
older tools from Microchip and so on, as well.)

If you set up a standard starting disk with, say, XP (and of course
all your favorite apps) on it, register your cpy of XP, get all the
updates, run "Windows Genuine Advantage" and then use XXCOPY (XXCOPY,
not XCOPY) to clone it multiple times, all the cloned disks will boot
and run just fine.

Hmm. Didn't know about that. Keep in mind that I do NOT run with any
other disk in the system, so there is no single "boot disk" that is
kept in the machine. There is only the one disk, itself.

That's the configuration I have been using, and it works fine.

One thing to keep in mind is that, while the resulting cloned disks
work fine as the only disk in the system, you need a different
setup to *make* the clones. Firstly, obviously you have to have
two hard drives to clone one to another. With XXCopy, they can
be on the same machine or on two machines connected with ethernet.
Secondly, you can't boot from the target hard drive, because it
will be competely erased and all data replaced with a clone of the
source drive. Thirdly, you can't boot from the target hard drive,
because Windos won't let XXCopy access some system files. My
solution was to partition my hard drives into two partitions
-- Data and OS -- and to install a copy of XP on each. Thus
I boot to C: on my two computers to clone D: over the network,
then I boot to D: on my two computers to clone C: over the
network.

Then it is not a solution for me. I won't permit ANY access at all --
even entirely accidental via some crash. The drives must be
completely bootable.

Oh, well. You almost made me happy. :)

Or, perhaps, I should say "maybe." I'm honestly not sure I understood
your explanation.

I need rackable disks. Yes, I can hook up two on the machine at once,
so I can handle performing a copy from one disk to another without a
network involved. But the result of the operation, however involved
it may be, must be a separately bootable drive that I can label,
install various software tools onto, update with _different_ drivers
as needed, and then develop on for decades. I may, at times, need to
keep a second copy of the drive which must be a complete image copy --
sector by sector -- so that installed software which may use special
hidden marks on the drive for legitimate authorization (I try very
hard to avoid such things, but some customers may insist on certain
tools that do such nasty things to me) don't cause trouble if I shift
to the backup drive when the primary one fails.

If some software crash (or virus) occurs and, as a result, some random
bit of code just happens to be lucky enough to enter ring 0, take
complete control of my computer, and accidentally or intentionally
erases every byte from every sector, trashes the partitions and all
data in other partitions, and otherwise messes with the sector headers
on the drive as well, that I can just forget the drive and grab the
backup and slap it in and reboot from it or else go on to another
project's drive and reboot. And there should be no possibility of
injury to other projects or their operating system environments, etc.

Does all the cloning operations you mention achieve that if I want it
to?

Jon
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Boot Problem
    ... Was either disk set up as a Microsoft dynamic disk? ... Do not change the boot sector signature. ... I ensure all OK by swapping over drives. ... installing XP as it insisted there was no drive to install itself on! ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: 2 drives needed to boot - how to fix
    ... my cloned drive and my system won't boot. ... seems my system wants both hard drives to be able to boot. ... Which is your primary master disk - the old or the new disk? ... Could you, in effect, start over by making a fresh install of the XP OS ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: NTLDR is missing
    ... Make sure that there are no disks in any removable drives when you boot. ... NTLDR is missing, why does it happen? ... Computer hard disk drive is not properly setup in BIOS. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: [SLE] Problems with initrd after mkinitrd
    ... A disk can have three real heads and report a dozen or a hundred! ... > natural metric for partitioning drives that use LBA. ... > - One, less frequent, is the failure of some of the cloned drives to boot ...
    (SuSE)
  • Re: Grub hangs - two hard drives and a CD
    ... > What you wrote is all based on a wrong assumption that grub numbers drives ... > that the BIOS will call to boot an OS. ... The Bios calls to read disk require the register DL to ...
    (comp.os.linux.setup)