[Techtalk] report on shiny new Thinkpad, or, Windows sux worse than ever

[Meredydd]

On Saturday 12 July 2003 10:18, Elena Bevell wrote:
> I have been experimenting with using Linux to reimage XP.
> Maybe something like this could work for you.  I boot the
> computer with a Linux rescue disk, rsync -avz all the files to
> another machine, rm -r * all the files in the Windows partition and
> then rsync the files back.  This seems to work, even if the partition
> size has been changed.  The problem is that you need to use the
> oldstyle vfat instead of the ntfs filesystem.  (I have heard that
> mandrake can write to a ntfs filesystem, but I have not tried this
> yet.)

*BOOP BOOP* Look out with this!

Yes, doing that with vfat works fine (my school's recovery system for a 
workstation used to be to boot the linux partition each ws had, wiping 
the win partition, and then extracting a tarball of the filesystem onto 
it. Won't restore boot settings, but people rarely messed that up).

However, if you try this with NTFS, bad things will happen. They use a 
funky ACL permissions system, so you will lose all your permissions 
info, which has a lovely knack of screwing a machine sideways.

Meredydd