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

[Elena Bevell]

On Friday 11 July 2003 10:13 pm, Carla Schroder wrote:

> I suppose I can dredge up a copy of Norton Speed disk, or something
> similar, to cram all the files together at the beginning of the disk. 


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.)
I don't know what those Windows files at the end of the partition could be
but I'm curious, if you care to elaborate.

Caveats: When I did this, the XP install was CD install, not
an OEM install.  And it wasn't a laptop.

All my local 'experts' told me that there was no way this
could work, but so far so good it seems. I don't like being
at the mercy of recovery systems that do something mysterious
that I have no control of.
hope it helps,
Elena