Re: Stopping USB drives from XY4

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Harry Binswanger  on Fri, 09 Dec 2005
17:56:50 -0500


>> least as regards XP. If one loads that programme asso-
>> ciated with the icon "Safely Remove Hardware," one gets
>> the message "Safe to remove now" or something very similar.

> Unless one doesn't. Which happens to me 5 out of 6 times.

That's because the system has concluded that you're hopeless and given up.

> That's what I've been doing, more or less, since the "Safely
> remove hardware" module is garbage--doesn't work most of the time.

I'm serious: I think your computer is terminally confused about what devices
you have installed -- not so much what is actually running right now, but
what's "installed" (in the Windows sense), meaning has a hidden device ID and
driver allocations that are remembered if you properly start and stop your
devices. There's really quite a dance going on in the background, you know.
Services turning on and off, allocation of power to the various peripherals,
finding ports for everything, plug and play identification, an insane amount of
registry activity. Behind your back, it may be installing new iterations of
your devices each time you plug one in that got yanked the last time around.
The Windows registry likes to know what is and isn't attached to the computer;
so does Explorer and a host of low-level services. Even if some friend comes
along just once and plugs in a flash drive, that *individual* device is
remembered in great detail (it's ID, its serial, internal codes) for the life
of the computer (you can hardly purge this info if you try!). I think you put
your finger on one issue, namely marginal power from notebooks and the like for
USB devices that aren't self-powered; this could easily trigger a tailspin
(e.g. hibernation, because auto-hibernation settings are almost always linked
to a low power state).

Anyway, when you think of all the tales we've heard here of machines that do
"funny things", or just die, or need to be reinstalled -- it isn't magic, there
are reasons. It also seems to me that the less a user knows about operating
systems and their repair, the more compelling the reason to follow the basic
rules and not be cavalier.

I have a different point of view, candidly. I back up very seldom. But I
never abuse the equipment. I put a notebook down on a hard surface like it was
a sparrow egg.

And BTW: USB flash drives are notoriously failure-prone. A very poor backup
medium. You might say "It hasn't happened to me!" Well, it hasn't happened to
me either. But my children toss them every few months. They're almost as
fragile as floppies, and easily fried too -- read any published specs about the
MTBF (mean time between failure) of memory keys. Speaking purely of backup,
the best solution is an external hard drive; when you need your backups, it's
important to be able to move the drive readily to another machine (or
equivalent, e.g. a new drive in the old machine). Second best is a second
internal drive. Backing up to the _same_ drive is virtually pointless, unless
you're simply concerned to be able to retrieve old versions of files -- but
that's not backup, that's archiving.

Another thing: if you think that, by thoroughly backing up your data to an
image or to another machine, you'll be able to reinstall a Windows operating
system on a replacement drive or another machine, think again. It won't work
-- not unless the drive geometry is identical (same exact hardware). What you
_can_ do is a barebones reinstall of the OpSys, and then overwrite everything
with your old data, excepting a few crucial files that are pertinent to the new
hardware only. (Is it flatass impossible to restore an image on new hardware?
No. If you have a thorough understanding of boot-up procedures and low-level
sectors, of how to write MBRs appropriate to your operating system, and of how
NT boots, you can do it. But unless there are deeply knowledgable lurkers
here, I doubt that anybody in this group has anything close to that expertise.
And it won't be easy, or necessarily successful, in the end.)

An important implication is that you need a physical CD to do any reinstall --
not these stupid hidden restore partitions on your original drive that the
manufacturers are pawning off! What good is that if your original drive fails?
Now is the time to contact your manufacturer to request a CD. I think most of
them will oblige; IBM does.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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