[Orcnet] Windows XP Service Pack 3

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 03:46:09PM -0700, Steve Wetterling wrote:
>
> My laptop is now volunteering to install Windows XP Service Pack 3.
> What is this likely to do to me and how do I mitigate the downside ?

Well, you should run complete backups, as in, be able to restore
an exact bootable duplicate of your hard drive.  I don't know the
available Windows tools, but in Linux you can do something like
"dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" and it will make a complete bit-by-bit
copy of the hda hard drive onto the hdb hard drive.  I dimly recall
that Windows tools like Drivecopy and older versions of Norton ghost
were able to do this.  

You can also boot from a Linux live CD and copy the Windows image
with that.  Booting from a CD (Linux or other) may be the safest
way to do this;  the Windows NTFS file system is not very coherent
while it is running, it does not have "atomic commits" (all or 
nothing writes) like better-designed file systems.

Laptop drives are awfully inexpensive these days.  If you can put
together a setup to clone the drive, that will protect you from
drive failures, theft, bad upgrades, and viruses, because all you
have to do is swap the other drive back in.  If you are as paranoid
as I am, you will have two external drives for this, and alternate
between them, so that if the laptop fails during backup you will
not scribble over your only good set of data ( Note:  a fast disk-
to-disk copy is stressful, so this is not as unlikely as you might
think).

A direct bit copy of a drive requires a target drive the same size
or a little larger.  A larger drive is a bit of a waste, because
all the file system tables size things for the smaller drive.  But
you will probably find it hard to locate a drive as small as the
one you bought with your laptop.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs