OT: Computer's...gotta hate 'em.

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:



OSes shouldn't be managing boot files willy-nilly during the normal shutdown process... The boot files don't need to change unless you change your hardware or kernel files, which certainly doesn't happen every time you are running the OS. That's just asking for trouble, and definitely a Windows flaw if true.

Note that he never said he was turning it off while shutting down, but rather while booting up. Killing the bootup early on isn't an issue, since all its doing is reading data and building up RAM files. Perhaps not good due to mild stress on the drive, but definitely not going to kill Windows at this point.

The reason that XP does this is so that it will restart after you make changes or add hardware. All Plug and Play OS’s need to overwrite the boot files at shut down. In the old days you had to write these files by hand. Sure it was more reliable, but it was beyond the abilities of most people. What he was doing is called bouncing the loader. If you happen to catch it at the wrong moment, you’ll end up with damaged files. If he had put a bootable floppy in the drive or a bootable OS like BartPC in the CD reader he would have gotten away with it in all likelihood.

[douglas]

That 8 MB of unpartitioned space is actually where the information on what partitions you have and what parts of the disk they are on is stored. No, it almost certainly doesn't actually require the whole 8 MB to store that information, that's just the smallest section of hard drive space it can allocate, just like a program requesting one extra byte of RAM is probably going to get a 4 KB chunk (which further requests will use until it's all gone) instead. Keeping track of space in units much smaller than that would require too much extra space dedicated to keeping track of it than the extra precision is likely to be worth.

[Alneyan]

Isn't all this information supposed to be stored in the MBR? (Or the EMBR, as applicable, and similar records) I know that's where I would expect to find my bootloader link and partition tables stored. Of course, XP isn't very informative either way: this space is labelled as unpartitioned (implying it isn't used at present), but if it really was empty, it isn't terribly useful to show the space up.

On the other hand, if XP is using some other space for a similar purpose, that could explain the difficulties when using this particular OS in a multi-boot. In particular, XP loves to "convert" FAT32 partitions created with fdisk, requiring a reboot afterwards (FAT partitions created via the XP installer are fine), so this could be a consequence of this behaviour.

Do you have any link with more info about this behaviour? I suspect it is linked to XP, since I've never seen it pop up on other OS (my current partition table does not show any unallocated space, if I fill it up to the max).

[Fyron]

Alneyan said:
Isn't all this information supposed to be stored in the MBR?

The MBR is in there, at least on the IDE0 master drive.

=0=

Why do you need 40 GB for Windows partition? Just move Program Files (and things like My Documents, Desktop, possibly even Start Menu) to a different partiton with TweakUI so you don't have to reinstall most apps when you reinstall Windows. Just change the pointers over and you're back in business.

[Thermodyne]

Any Apps that write to the registry during install will need to be reinstalled with the OS anyway. And most fully compliant windows apps will install some files to the system drive regardless of where you point the installer. I went with 40 because it's so hard to resize the system partition, and doing so puts your system at risk. He could go with 20 or even 10, but if he runs out later, it's a long process to increase that partition. He has space to burn, so why not 40?

Anyways, once we move him to using image files, his reinstall/reactivate day are done. If it hoses up, blow the image back onto it. 15min tops and you’re done.

[Fyron]

Most apps I use don't need to use the registry. The tiny number that do can just be reinstalled as needed. Using the registry for user level apps was a terrible invention anyways. Hopefully Vista does away with it and makes apps keep their own data (hopefully in a sensible manner using XML or so)...

The goal here is to separate the operating system from the user level apps as much as possible. *nix makes this easy with mount points. TweakUI can let you approximate it tolerably.

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:
Most apps I use don't need to use the registry. The tiny number that do can just be reinstalled as needed. Using the registry for user level apps was a terrible invention anyways. Hopefully Vista does away with it and makes apps keep their own data (hopefully in a sensible manner using XML or so)...

The goal here is to separate the operating system from the user level apps as much as possible. *nix makes this easy with mount points. TweakUI can let you approximate it tolerably.

Last I heard, weren’t you a CS major?

I don’t have any idea what apps you use, but based on your statement, I have a good idea about what you don’t use.

With windows XP and to some extent 2K, the whole idea is to gain app performance by integrating applications into the OS. All of the major applications I work with daily use windows integration. Office 03 and XP both use it. Autodesk uses it. Micro station uses it. Adobe uses it. Roxio, Intuit, Adaptec, Cisco, Firefox, Plextor, Symantec, Peachtree just to name a few. I can’t recall seeing an app come out in the last couple of years that didn’t write to the registry. There is just too much to be gained from integration not to go wit it. I’d have to go back to something like Office 97 probably, before finding one without it. In the business world, if it installs locally these days, it’s integrated. Even some of the big web front-end’d db apps install clients to integrate themselves with windows.

Just out of curiosity, what apps do you run?

[Renegade 13]

Good news! It seems I just have a temperamental computer...

I killed it via the power switch, left it for a moment, fired it back up and voila! it functions perfectly again. I'm at a loss to explain why any of this happened, but now that it's fixed I really don't care too much.

It is odd though that a reset would not fix the problem (I tried resetting once), but a full power-down would...

Once again I'm in your debt Thermodyne and Alneyan for the help you provided me. I'm just surprised this time it had such a simple solution...