Re: How workable is Vista?

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:07:05 +0000, Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan wrote:

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.

Two comments:

First, making a sector by sector copy is a Bad Idea. Supposedly
identical drives often have slightly different sizes, error mappings,
etc. XXCopy does a perfect clone of the entire filesystem after the
OS does a format, and thus you can restore to *any* drive that has
enough room. If you are dead set on a sector copy, do both and make
an XXCopy copy as well.

Second, a sector by sector copy doesn't accomplish the goal that
you think it does. That outside-of-the-filesystem data is very
likely to be erased when a user does a defrag, and thus the
software vendors are not likely to store copy protection data
there. The usual places (hidden files, diagnostic track, boot
record), XXCopy handles fine. Also, a sector by sector copy
doesn't clone everything. Many copy protection schemes use the
hard drive serial number (HDSN), S.M.A.R.T. data, Firmware Revision
number, etc. No cloning method copies all of those.

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?

With the obvious exceptions (making the clone after the drive is
trashed, making the clone after you are infected, making the clone
and thus putting the same app that later crashes and burns the same
way on both drives), all of which are avoided by cloning a fresh
OS install and from then on only working with one drive at a time,
Yes. Using XXCopy to make a clone accomplishes the above. The
drive siiting in the fire safe powered-down cannot be destroyed by
anything running on the PC in the other room.

BTW, if you want a "belt and suspenders" solution, make one clone
with XXCopy, another to another drive with Nortom Ghost, then use
TrueImage to make a restorable backup to recordable DVDs. This
will make it so that no two hardware or software faiures can hose
all of your data. The TrueImage DVD copy will come in very handy
if your PC ever has a hardware failure that makes it into a disk
drive destroyer...

I personally use three redundant computers, and backup my customer
data to multiple SD cards and USB flash drives. This makes it so
that I can go longer between cloning my three main OSs (SlackWare
Linux, Windows XP, QNX).

Interesting discussion for me. I've got a learning curve to conquer,
now. Thanks.

Jon
.

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