Re: Vista/7 permissions for script?

I'm thinking that the various versions of
Vista would also have to be taken into account.
When I was thinking about
how to do the analysis, I thought that only Vista Ultimate shipped with
all
the tools to allow playing with the parameters involved. My cheaper Vista
didn't have these tools, and Vista's terrible search tool made it too
frustrating to find out what was actually there.


Tools? I don't follow. You mean the administrator
applets? Aren't those on all systems? They might
not be on the Start Menu, but they must be there
somewhere.

I guess I'd like to see a table of your info, for
all the classes of users,
with UAC on and off, and with no, one of some
or all users needing to supply
a password to log on, etc, etc, etc.
You haven't mentioned the "Installer"
user who has special right on my system.

My only experience so far with Vista has been
setting up my elderly father's new box a few weeks
ago. I build my own PCs. And of course there's no
OEM Win7 yet. So I'm not really familiar with OEM
Vista setups. I assume "Installer" must be either
the real admin. or a fake admin., with the difference
being that a script writing to HKLM will fail in the
hands of the latter. As far as I can tell, real
admin, fake admin, and "user" are the only categories.
Real admin has permission, fake admin can get
permission, usually, and users are severely limited.

One change in Win7 is that UAC has 4 possible
settings. But for anyone technically literate that
doesn't seem to me to be of much value. It only
controls when one will see nags, so as Alex indicated
in his explanation, its value is really for controlling
unruly software and junkware installs. The problem I
see with that is that the concept is flawed: If I don't
trust the software, or at least have the ability to
control it, then I don't want it installed. Anything that
calls online without permission or makes Registry
changes, for instance, will be eliminated. But once I've
decided that I want to keep a given program, the UAC
restrictions are not actually protecting me from problem
software because the software is me. :) It's doing my
bidding. So UAC is just getting in the way.

I don't know what 'built-in' users
are HP's creation and which are Microsoft's creation. Too bad I don't
know
Installer's password.

HP created an Installer identity and you
can't control it? Why do you need to control it?
And are you sure the password's
not just blank? (That seems to be another
distinction with the real admin -- Windows 7
[and presumably Vista] won't allow it to not
use a password, while XP admin and Vista/7
fake admin can have a blank password.)

I Ghosted the hard drive of my Compaq Vista system
before its first boot, so I can truely get back to its as-shipped
condition.
I'm amazed at the amount of scripting stuff in the system, most of it in
Python. I assume the first boot environment is Windows PE, and a person
could mess with that preboot system to make it more to his liking. I was
never able to successfully do that first boot when I restored the Ghost
image's boot partition to a larger partition in a larger hard drive -- it
always had to be the same size boot partition. Since my cheapo system
came
with a 160GB hard drive, I'm limited by that primary partition size no
matter how large a drive I restore to. The rest of the drive is
accessible
as additional partitions.


I'm not sure I followed that. Are you talking about
trying to reinstall an disk image without needing
to install the OEM restore partition? I Bought BootIt NG
awhile back and find it very capable. I haven't used it
with Vista, but it's fine for multi-booting with XP. It
can format, resize, create, delete, etc. When
I downloaded Win7 it went onto a Bootit-managed
XP PC. After writing the install DVD I repartitioned
the disk to create a 16 GB primary for Win7. (I usually
like to use C drives of about 2 GB for easy disk imaging,
then put all data on other partitions. But Win7 is
*incredibly* bloated. A basic install with no software
came out to 9+ GB!)
The install went fine, with Win7 letting me choose
which partition to install to. I haven't tried to resize the
Win7 partition since installing, but I have no reason to
think that I couldn't.

The Win7 install corrupted the MBR, kicking out
BootIt and putting the Win7 boot manager in its
place. (A rather outrageous liberty to take considering
that Win7 is a RC with an expiration date!) A look at
the BootIt website provided me with info. and directions
to fix the problem. It turns out that Vista/7 do not
boot the same way that XP does. When installing an XP
image the C:\boot.ini file needs to be edited. Any boot
manager will boot XP via boot.ini. But then the system
that XP's booter starts depends on what's in boot.ini.
So if, say, XP is put on the 3rd primary partition of disk 0
then boot.ini needs to reflect that with a boot command
string of something like:
multi(0)rdisk(0)disk(0)partition(3)....

Fortunately BootIt provides the option to edit files on
disk, so it's not hard to juggle around XP partitions.

In the case of Vista/7 there's a boot* file and a boot*
folder. (I've forgotten the exact names. Maybe boot.ecd
or something like that? Those (the file and folder) need to
be on the partition being booted. BootIt also provides the
option to edit the Vista/7 boot config. To make a long story
short, with BootIt and their online directions I was able
to set up a multi-boot with XP and Win7, each system on
the partition of my choosing, and BootIt in charge.

I don't know if any of that info. helps you. :) From
your description it sounds like there's no limitation you're
having that BootIt can't get around. (And maybe there
are other ways other than BootIt.) I've been using
disk images for years. Since I build my own boxes
I don't have an original OEM config. I just set up the
system to my liking, installing the software, cleaning up,
choosing settings, etc. Then when I've got it the way
I want it I make disk images. That way, by backing up
a few things like email, and by keeping redundant file
backups on different partitions, I can recover from a total
loss in about an hour with virtually no actual loss of data.



.

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