You just need to know a filesystems MVP. :)

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Ben Scott
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2014 8:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] move hdd with windows 7 on it

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Free, Bob <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Microsoft's documentation on this is not as good as it could be
>
> When I wanted to learn and understand this stuff back in the NT days, 
> I went straight to the Custer(Russinovich)(Solomon book). I have quite 
> a stack of them now.

  Indeed.  Matter of fact, I've got the 5th edition on my desk right now (see 
my recent thread about network hangs).  But even with that, there are things 
that are pretty murky.

  For example, what the heck is a "recognizer driver"?  It has a defined 
symbolic name, SERVICE_RECOGNIZER_DRIVER, but most of the Microsoft 
documentation just says "Reserved".  One document goes so far as to explain it 
as a "file system recognizer driver".  Great, so what does *that* mean?  
/Windows Internals/ doesn't cover it, either, as far as I can tell.

  (I eventually found third-party documentation that explains that a filesystem 
recognizer driver is the thing responsible for determining if a given disk or 
partition is of a particular filesystem type, and thus triggers the loading of 
the actual filesystem driver.  It's a separate driver so the kernel isn't 
bloated with filesystem implementations it doesn't need.  Makes sense.  But 
finding that out was ridiculously hard.  Thanks to Snowden, it's easier to find 
top secret NSA documents than it was to discover this. ;-) )

-- Ben


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