Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

FAT was never reliable under any OS.

I tell my driver students, "assume that at any reboot cycle your entire hard drive will
disappear in a puff of greasy blue smoke. Therefore, you NEVER debug a driver on a
machine that contains ANYTHING you care about. You keep all your source on another
machine. Your driver debug machine is ALWAYS to be considered 100% sacrificial, no
exceptions." Only the most naive programmer would ever consider debugging a device driver
on a live machine (one that has anything on it that matters in the slightest).

A couple times a year, we lose a machine to a student error. They manage to clobber
something that destroys the root directory or something equally unpleasant. I unpack the
spare machine, plug it in, they spend five minutes reconfiguring it, and they're back at
work. Meanwhile, I'm re-ghosting the machine they clobbered (takes about 35 minutes) so
if they nuke it again, we'll still have a running machine. Of course, they;ll have to
wait a while longer if they nuke the second one before the ghosting completes. I've not
had this happen.
joe

On Thu, 24 May 2007 19:48:49 -0700, "Alexander Grigoriev" <alegr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I had files lost with FAT32 under Win2K. A friend of mine lost directory
with source code if the driver he was debugging.
But NTFS survived quite a lot of abuse, including memory errors.

"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:tj6c53dp05uhgk5iioifvn7h8tb6imdfar@xxxxxxxxxx
I had a lot of problems with FAT file systems, including one memorable
night when it wiped
the master boot record nours before I was supposed to leave on a trip with
my computer. I
spent six solid hours salvaging files. It Was Not A Fun Evening. I
finished up ten
minutes after the cab arrived to take me to the airport, at 4am (I fell
asleep in the cab,
which was good because we were going out in an ice storm, and the cab was
all over the
highway)
joe

On Thu, 24 May 2007 11:30:52 -0700, "David Ching"
<dc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:df6b531pbrrjmqltrfud9jae812jo77lor@xxxxxxxxxx
Historical note: as recently as 2003, a certain large multinational
company required that
all machines be configured with a FAT file system under XP, "because it
is
more secure".
This proves beyond all doubt that we are descended from monkeys, except
for certain IT
managers, who have not yet evolved. A friend of mine who worked there
was
told this when
his computer was installed (the second day he worked there), and when he
stopped laughing
he typed 'dconvert' to a command shell to convert it to NTFS. When he
was
told 'you can't
do that' he looked blank and said "but I just did!". Ultimately his
group
had the only
NTFS-based systems in the entire company (even the servers were FAT,
except for his
group's servers).

I resisted NTFS for many years because it had poorer performance that a
regularly defragmented FAT-32, especially if journalling is enabled, which
it took a reg key to disable (don't know the case now). In addition, it
was
downright handy to use a Win98 boot disk to boot to DOS and be able to
access files on drive C:. For me, the only reason to move to NTFS was its
support of files larger than 4 GB, which I get regularly now that I record
video using Media Center.

As for reliability, FAT-32 was plenty reliable. Even if you had to
ScanDisk
all the time. I rarely lost data that couldn't be recovered. BTW, you
still have to ChkDsk even now after a crash, but in Vista, MS chose to
display a blank screen when it's running. As if hiding the truth will
somehow make the pain go away.

-- David

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.