Re: OT: DOS booting

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

J R FOX wrote:
--- Harry Binswanger  wrote:
work when the main drive is in trouble. Of course,
"Recovery discs" came
with the computer. And of course, they don't do
anything helpful.
I'm a bit unclear as to what Harry is trying to do
here. At first I thought he was looking for a dual boot
alternative to running Xy under XP; now it sounds more
like an insurance policy to get at the system when (not
if) Windows corrupts itself. But I don't think either
is doable with one huge partition. You're going to have
to do what Robert and I have been recommending till
we're blue in the face: get Partition Commander or
Partition Magic and break up that hard drive; have a
FAT32 data partition; and preferably another FAT32 for
Xy. (It runs fine on FAT32; no need to drop back to
FAT16.) While you're at it, make another partition and
move your swap file (pagefile.sys, IIRC, in NT) to it;
speeds things up (esp. if this is a laptop, which
nearly always has too little RAM).

Unless all you want to do is restore factory defaults,
which undoes everything you had, ever since the
initial plain Windows install. I was just reading
some complaints on this very score, in another thread
on another mailing list.
IMHO, the combination of nothing but a Restore
CD/Partition and an otherwise unpartitioned hard drive
is a prescription for disaster. I won't say what I
think of the ethics of the companies that sell systems
so configured, or the intelligence of the people who
buy them and think they can just sit down and get to
work. (I realize that with a laptop, buying bare iron
and setting it up yourself isn't a realistic option;
but there are steps you can take: partition the drive,
get a real copy of Windows--and maybe, as Norman Bauman
suggested, sue Microsludge or the PC manufacturer for
the cost in small claims court).

Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx