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

[Kevin Arisa]

Partitioning is usually the very first thing I ever do to a computer. Personally, I think all computers should be sold with the drives already partitioned, especially since the average user has no clue what it's all about. Three partitions: System, Apps, and Games at the very least. I never understood the logic of having the entire hard drive being one big "bucket" that everything is tossed into. Not only does partitioning protect against most cases of accidental formatting, it even increases the rate at which a computer finds it's files. Instead of searching through the previously mentioned bucket, it is looking through designated compartments. And if the System partition gets corrupted , then you can reformat that compartment without fear of harming anything else. It's a priceless setup that has saved me vast amounts of trouble in the past.

[Renegade 13]

Imperator Fyron said:
What kind of "recovery" CD was this? If it was provided by an OEM, it is possible that it has a config file that is set to say yes to some or all of the installation prompts, such as "format the drive and install, even if an install already exists." You'd have to have a pretty stupid OEM to do that, but you never know...

Renegade: You should probably throw the "recovery" CD in the face of the head of the company that made your comp, then demand a real XP CD sans the garbage config file.

Yep, it was provided by the OEM. I should send 'em the CD and tell them where to stick it...I've reinstalled OS's before, and always just had them reinstall over the existing installation. Easy, no data lost. I (foolishly, it seems) trusted that this recovery CD would allow me to do the same. I think I will be having a little chat the company, and see if I can get a real copy of XP.

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.

That's exactly what happened. I never shut down during the shutdown procedure, only during the start-up, which I had done before with no ill effects, assuming it would have no ill effects again...

SJ, I will be partitioning the drive into a purely windows drive and an "Everything else" drive. The more safeguards, the better.

Sivran, thanks a lot for the link I'll have to take a look at that program, see what I can do.

It's a good thing I have a bunch of data on another computer. No personal files unfortunately, but things like mods, a few shipset files, that kind of stuff.

[StarShadow]

'Recovery' cd's are evil, they generally don't recover anything, they 'restore' your system to 'like-new' condition (ie. they reformat your HD and re-install the OS, and to hell with whatever else you had installed). As SJ said, it's a good idea to have an OS partition, and an 'everything else' partition. I'm really not impressed in the least by OEM's who give you a 'recovery' cd instead of a proper OS cd, then again I build my systems myself, so that's not really an issue for me lol...

[Fyron]

Make sure to install TweakUI so you can move various system folders (my documents, desktop, possibly program files) off the Windows no fly zone and into the safe zone. Makes it even easier to get back up and running after Windoze reinstalls.

Atrocities said:
why?

Because Windoze needs semi-frequent reinstalls to fix it after it eats itself. Just part of regular system maintenance.

=0=

Even better is to create a disk clone of the Windows partition just after you install it and your base programs, if you have a few gigs on the other partition you want to devote to this. Don't buy any crappy Symantec products for this. Probably a better tool on that site Sivran linked (and some not so good ones, so make sure to do your testing before you get too far along).

=0=

Dunno that I'd want to have to juggle space between apps and games, personally. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

[StarShadow]

Yes, what I'd suggest, if you have a DVD burner, is to make your system partition about 4 gigs (8 gigs if you use dual-layer), install your OS and preferred base programs, then image the partition to DVD. That way, you only need to restore the image to have a working system again.

[Atrocities]

Imperator Fyron said:
Make sure to install TweakUI so you can move various system folders (my documents, desktop, possibly program files) off the Windows no fly zone and into the safe zone. Makes it even easier to get back up and running after Windoze reinstalls.

Because Windoze needs semi-frequent reinstalls to fix it after it eats itself. Just part of regular system maintenance.

=0=

Even better is to create a disk clone of the Windows partition just after you install it and your base programs, if you have a few gigs on the other partition you want to devote to this. Don't buy any crappy Symantec products for this. Probably a better tool on that site Sivran linked (and some not so good ones, so make sure to do your testing before you get too far along).

=0=

Dunno that I'd want to have to juggle space between apps and games, personally. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

The problem is, most people, including myself, really don't know how to do any of this. So it never gets done.

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:


Because Windoze needs semi-frequent reinstalls to fix it after it eats itself. Just part of regular system maintenance.

I'll have to disagree with you on this one. The vast majority of XP systems never get reinstalled. The system I'm on now is using a three year old install, and still works fine. At work, 90+ percent of the workstations never get a new install during their 4 year life. We were never close to that with 98 or 2K. To be fair, 2K is probably just as good as XP, but didn’t benefit from the management tools that XP enjoys now.

Most reinstalls not related to hardware are done because of three things. Removing malware by formatting is the biggest cause. Installing unsigned drivers and software is the second. And user error is third.

[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).