[ale] Finding desktops, laptops and hardware in Atlanat

[Geoffrey]

James P. Kinney III wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 08:18 -0500, Geoffrey wrote:
> 
>> This is the direction most vendors are headed.  Sucks, because they 
>> expect you to not use that portion of the hard drive.   As I noted 
>> previously, I had to create 10 cds off the existing drive of a compaq 
>> computer in order to have my 'restore' disks.  That's around 6 gig of 
>> wasted space on the drive.
>>
> While it could be viewed (and is) as wasted drive space, it is also a
> real butt-saver for the clueless windows crowd. Their system gets borked
> and they can repair it by rebooting to the hidden partition and doing an
> overlay installation. Yes, hard drives can fail and they can loose the
> entire thing. But if it's a system under warranty from, say Dell, they
> can send you a new hard drive ready to go with the hidden partition.

I can't believe you would defend this as a support issue.  Certainly 
even clueless users know how to 'insert the cdrom that says "restore 
disk".'  I would think that would be easier then telling them how to 
boot to a different partition.

> Realistically, a clueless newbie with an 80G drive is a dangerous thing!

A clueless newbie with a computer is a dangerous thing..

> I _MUCH_ prefer to see a an application drive (C:) and a data drive (D:)
> and the hidden partition so the use of the hidden partition to overlay
> keeps the "My Documents" folder intact. But that is never how things are
> installed. It sure would make M$ crap more upgrade/repair friendly.

I would agree with the separate data partition, but let's remember, this 
is M$, they don't care about your data.


> On some systems that I have built, I have created a linux partition with
> the ability to store a dd copy of the main winbloze application
> partition. That wastes loads of space but give me the ability to "roll
> back" and entire system when the box gets hosed by a bad app/bug/moron
> on the keyboard.

dd > /dev/cdrom...

> g4l would be a better way but it still needs better windows tools to
> actually defrag the drive and create one contiguous chunk of used blocks
> and then write NULL to the rest of the drive so it can get compress away
> to nothing.

g4l???

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey