[realmusicians] Re: backing up and dual booting
- From: "Nektarios Mallas" <nmallas@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <realmusicians@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 16:15:11 +0200
Chris, I found a couple of live cds of windows xp around and you can
actually boot from the cd directly to a windows xp GUI and run programs
such as antivirus, imaging disks etc. I don't know what do they do with swap
memory and stuff but it works. All we need to do is to integrate some basic
audio drivers such as realtech or similar and then run nvda. Now that I am
thinking about it, you can use one of those cheap USB speakers to have some
audio out of windows.
I am not giving any links to those live cds here because of stupid legal
reasons, but if someone is interested, send me an email and I would be glad
to explain in detail.
However, I will post again if I can run NVDA successfully from the live xp
cd and some useful apps after that.
Happy hacking.
Nektarios.
P.S. It is very quite on the teamtalk server. I am login in regularly and
noone is around.
Let's keep it up.
-----Original Message-----
From: realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Belle
Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2010 7:07 AM
To: realmusicians@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [realmusicians] Re: backing up and dual booting
Actually, there is ntfs pro which will allow you to see ntfs partitions in
dos, it takes a litle more precious conventional memory, but it helps.
I don't think it'll be possible with micro-crap to do a talking windows
install because we don't implement efi yet, and what with real mode text
mode drivers, and sata drivers, well we do have ide immulation, but what
with all the old and new bits clunky legacy dos and windows technology that
has to be considered, it may not be possible without completely installing
the os from scratch.
Now that's possible with a cd and floppy, or just a cd with a .sif file, but
you don't get as much control as you do with a hard-drive unattended
installation where you can use dos ahead of time to format and partition and
such.
YOu can always do stuff with an existing windows install to clone to another
hard-drive and such but inevitably, we always have to re-boot and go in to
text mode or console mode, and that's the problem.
Linux and mac users can have talking installs because things are done
differently, I have heard that there is a way with some of the system
accewss to go products to do a talking w7 or vista install, I'll have to
check that out, I haven't gotten away from xp yet, and what with all our old
favorite plug-ins probably crapping out and not being updated so soon, I'm
not in a hurry to dump for the dubious benefits of 64 bit but as time goes
on, that will get better.
But now is the time to learn about it because it'll be our future.
It'll be nice to load those huge sample libraries up in to memory and say
good bye to all the hassle with disk streaming.
So my next work station will be a 64 bit w7 but I'll certainly have xp dual
booting on it for all the good old stand bys we love and that work fine with
today's technology.
At 06:17 AM 2/3/2010, you wrote:
>Hay Chris, nice message. I will keep it for reference here.
>I have been using image for windows myself for quite some time now and
>I am very pleased with it.
>I have been playing with some windows xp live cds lately, and I am
>trying to integrate NVDA so that I will be able to boot from a talking
>windows cd rather than dos.
>All my partitions around here are ntfs so booting from a pure dos
>environment is no option for me.
>Nice job.
>
>Nektarios.
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>[mailto:realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Belle
>Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 10:58 PM
>To: realmusicians-freelists.org
>Subject: [realmusicians] backing up and dual booting
>
>Just wanted to start a little discussion about back-up software and
>imaging and such.
>
>I've been playing with operating system configs and such and have
>managed to create a dual boot system with the use of selected software
>packages without any sighted help.
>
>I am using two copies of xp at the moment and here's what I did.
>
>One piece of software that I am now embracing is casper, I formerly
>didn't care for it because it was window's only based, but since casper
>can now boot from usb devices, you can run windows from a thumb drive
>if you wish, then this makes it more valuable and also although I think
>traditional methods of restoring without windows being in the way are
>more secure and safer, ie, less likelihood of viruses and such being
>transferred, it's still nice to be able to restore partitions and such in
windows only when desired.
>
>Casper and the terrabyte unlimited products both ddos and windows
>versions, and an old copy of partition magic were my main tools of choice.
>
>I did use ghost, and drive snapshot too, but the main disadvantage of
>ghost is that the dos side of things doesn't talk at all and your
>limited to batch files and knowing ahead of time where your drives are
>as you need the controller numbers and partition numbers to accomplish
this.
>
>But with image for dos from terrabyte you can restore interactively and
>with casper operating in only windows, if you have a second partition
>somewhere that's got a copy of your OS on it, you can restore to the
>version of the OS your not using currently.
>It's helpful to keep a copy of your boot.ini file in another location
>that has references to all your operating systems handy so you can
>restore that configuration on the fly after restoring a partition.
>
>My only problem is that I can't seem to get a copy of windows which was
>installed on the first or only partition of a drive to boot from the
>second or third partition of a drive and I think this is an nt thing,
>2k was even more picky about this sort of thing, but what I did was to
>partition my third drive in to several partitions it's a 300 gig
>drive, and each partition is now less that 120 gigs.
>
>When in dos it seems with sata drives you have to keep some factors in
>mind, files larger that 2gb or partitions that are too large or have
>too many files on them won't get read properly and you can't restore.
>
>I was having this problem with image for dos until I made smaller
>partitions and now things work well.
>
>Image for windows will also resize partitions on the fly, some of these
>backup softwares expect to have the same size drive or partition to
>restore to and will puke if they don't see that.
>
>That's the way drive snapshot is, at least with fat32 partitions.
>
>I like to use fat32 for all the obvious reasons, at least on system
>drives, I keep some ntfs partitions for large ISO files and other
>things, but if you ever have a drive problem fat32 is much easier to deal
with.
>
>So because drive snapshot has problems with resizing images, I'm
>converting all my images to ghost or terra byte images.
>
>So far if I had to tchose the two products I'd use exclusively, it's be
>the terrabyte atuff for flexibility and accessibility and casper for
>the window's only aspect and ease of use for the non-technical person
>or command line challenged individual.
>
>But casper's partitioning and drive c onfiguration facilities aren't as
>advanced as even the old partition magic so you really need a couple of
>different tools.
>
>So I have my operating systems on a loan partition on my c drive which
>is drive 0 in the bios, and the first partition of drive 1 which is the
>way it shows up in dos or the bios.
>
>Of course windows changes things around so it's important to check
>depending on whether your in dos or windows to make sure what's refering to
what.
>
>A couple of good ways to help are making sure you always give your
>drives meaningful volume labels and observing the size of the partitions or
drives.
>What I did was to put an early unclutered installation of my studio
>machine on the first partition of the second drive and leave the hither
>to system drive alone, I didn't re-partition it because remember, some
>of this drive software expects to see the same size partition that was
>backed up when it restores, so until I get these images re-sized, I'm
playing it safe.
>
>So we have gwo default places to back up or restore images to and from
>and we can do so in windows or in dos.
>
>I'm going to make a small partition on my third drive and make it the
>first partition and see if I can get a third os to boot.
>
>Right now according to the best information I have, there are issues
>with the boot configurations with vista and windows
>7 which make it hard to back up properly since microslop changes the
>way in which things boot and one has to adjust the boot record to make
>these new operating systems boot properly when one deploys an images or
>such, and I'm not properly using w7 yet, but we'll be nailing these
>issues down soon I hope.
>
>Anyway, that's some of what we've been doing after christmas here at
>the studio.
>
>So if you don't want to have to install from scratch a complete
>operating system, you can use a copy of the one you already have
>installed if you put it on the same place on another drive in regards to
partition position.
>
>There's probably a way to fix or change this in a boot record.
>I bet DJX knows some real nuggets about this sort of thing 'grin'.
>
>But anyone feel free to chime in with experiences because we all need
>to keep our machines fresh and well oiled to make all that great music
>and also to do daily things, and I'm a bad boy, I swore I wouldn't do
>anything else with this machine but studio things, but it's just too
>atractive to use your fastest machine in the house to do everything, so
>one needs to learn to manage those dangerous habbits 'grin'.
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