Re: DOS commands etc. (Off Topic)

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia,

You raised a few interesting points I wanted to respond to.

"Patricia M. Godfrey" wrote:

> but ever since I got a CD-R, I tend to think of CDs as giant
> floppies or portable hard drives.

A lot of people do, but in my experience, this can be risky. There is some finite
# of sessions that you get, writing to the same CD. (I'm talking about CD-R, as
I've rarely used a CD-RW.) Every time you do a new session, the old CD directory
structure and Table of Contents gets replaced by a new one -- not just if you
revise the same file without changing the name. I have seen a few CDs get trashed
that have a goodly # of sessions burned to it, with some of the previously recorded
material "disappearing." If it is still there but you can't get back to it, it is
effectively gone. I've also seen the CD directory structure come out like chop
suey, or the CD not even be mountable in another CD-reader, other than the drive
that burned it. There may be much better protection against these maladies when
using the newer burners that have the "BurnProof" technology, but I still prefer to
be conservative, copying a large block of files at one time, and keeping my # of
sessions on the same CD as low as I can manage. Doing that, it has been a rather
long time since I ruined a CD.

Also, a really important CD should be duped when full or nearly so. Hey, what's an
extra buck for a whole lot of extra piece of mind ? Sometimes I even use Roman
Stangl's XCOMP (no WIN version, I'm afraid), which does recursive file comparisons
between two supposed-to-be identical CDs.

>     Yes XCopy still exists in Win9.x (don't know about 2000, ME, or XP). In
> 95 you could strip or retain H, R, and S attributes; in 98 they nastily
> removed the ability to XCOPY hidden and system files from pure DOS (i.e.,
> after shutting down and booting to the DOS prompt), thus making it
> impossible to just XCOPY your whole system to another partition and
> thence to a CD.

MickeySoft has been removing stuff for years. They dropped DISKCOMP, DISKCOPY, and
FC a long time ago, the latter being a useful complement to the COMP command.
O.K., the first two are strictly for floppies, and floppies are generally
irrelevant now in the WIN world, but these three items can still be quite useful.
At least up through W98, I was able to lift _certain_ DOS versions of these items,
add them back, and have them still work. Other versions would not work. This was
on other people's systems. Don't recall if I had as much success with NT on my own
system.

> (You cannot XCOPY all the system files while you're in
> Win, because some of them are in use).

Like the notable acronym, used to recall the array of switches for duping a whole
partition with the OS/2 ver. of XCOPY -- /H /O/ T/ S/ E/ R/ V -- usually from one
hard drive to another. Don't ask me what all those options stand for, I have no
clue.

> Really dumb, from M$'s point of
> view, because if people could put their own system on a CD and run it on
> other computers when they need to, they'd be less tempted to make and use
> illegal copies or run one copy permanently on several systems. Not to
> mention the need to back up your system before something "fixes"
> something on it that you didn't want fixed.

That's an interesting take on it, but I'm sure the OS vendors would disagree. Jack
Troughton wrote a very intriguing article for "extended attributes" magazine, on
the subject of a still little-known utility that was introduced for ECS (a.k.a.
Warp 4.5). With this utility and some study, he suggested, it should be possible
to make a bootable, fully customized version of your home ECS setup, including your
most critacal app.s, your own desktop, defaults, etc., and carry it around to
whatever machine. That would be something I think no other OS has ever offered,
and is a major reason I got interested in ECS. I would love to see someone publish
a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish this. This utility is apparently already
in use for the ECS install CD: it first queries you regarding what particular
hardware you have, in order to determine which drivers to load into memory, with
the hope that few rigs it encounters will have a h/w combination sufficiently alien
as to stump it.

But wait, not so fast. At a presentation I attended, given by the head of Serenity
Systems, which puts out ECS, he implied (somewhat cryptically) that IBM, in its
infinite wisdom, does not want customers to be able to create their own bootable,
fully portable OS environment, well-equipped and fully customized to their own
requirements. (And I strongly suspect that any other OS vendor would hold the same
position. Except maybe Linux, which I don't think has any means of performing this
little parlor trick anyway.) Therefore, the scope of what this utility can do has
apparently been hobbled, in order to prevent that. It may still be technically
possible to hack one's way around this, but I don't have a degree in computer
science or a roadmap.


Jordan