At 10:17 PM 12/24/2009, Tony B wrote: >Spoken like someone that has never heard of Windows XP, or all >subsequent versions of Windows. Do you still have a floppy drive in >your computer? :)
No but I do have an external USB-attached floppy drive, which works as well as a motherboard-attached one, on modern (last few years) computers. It allows the use of writable media for various "utilities" that run on the separate OS of the bootable media (bootable floppy disk). And a lot of my legacy utilities are still useful. CMOSSAVE is one of them, although I haven't had CMOS information blown away by some program installation recently. Still, CMOS can still potentially be corrupted. Can one today make a writable utility boot CD, that loads it's own OS and write program? So that one can really move everything to CD discs? What is the program for it? I want writable media so I can easily add additional utilities, and update virus definitions. Thumb drives seem to be doing it, but not all emergency utility "discs" seem to be able to make a bootable thumb drive. It's getting there. Most machines still seem to reliably boot from the external USB-attached floppy drive without "doing anything" (e.g., remembering the keystroke to bring up the boot menu, or going into CMOS to change the boot device ordering). Not so simple with thumb drives in my experience. What is the "best" generic recovery utility boot device and program these days?? Mine, at the moment, in addition to CMOSSAVE, is a floppy boot disc that will reload a saved disc (partition) image from backup. First thing you do with a new computer is to make a partition image of the as-installed system. Then, immediately, one of the junkware-removed system. Then, immediately, one with all of the basic essential software (that wasn't bundled) installed. Fred Holmes ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
