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Current System Partitions—Day 6© Copyright Darrell Anderson. Unlike many people, my current production computer is a multi-boot system. About two years ago I took my first steps toward migrating when I decided to repartition my hard drive. I have added, deleted, and moved partitions many times since deciding that eventually I would migrate. My current drive is divided into 25 partitions! As far back as my pure MS-DOS days (pre-Windows 3.x) I was already a believer in disk partitions. Since those days I always have had at least a C: (system), D: (applications), and E: (data) partition. Partitions do nothing to prevent hard drive failures, but provide several safeguards against software failures. My NT4 configuration consists of several partitions. Two partitions for booting, one for applications, one for data, one for temporary and scratch files, one for temporary backups, and one larger partition for temporary storage and CD burning. Some people might wonder how I am able to install all application software into a separate partition instead of the infamous C:\Program Files directory. The answer is a handful of registry changes. C:\Program Files does not exist on my computer! Long before live CDs became popular to rescue systems I was using two boot partitions to accomplish the same. Windows is well known for locking various files, specifically the registry files. Those file locks prevent easy backups and restorations. Booting from a different partition avoids that problem. The second boot partition contains only a minimal NT installation. I use my alternate boot partition to take snapshots of my primary registry files before I venture into the tinkering zone, such as installing software. If things do not go according to Hoyle, I reboot to my alternate partition and restore my primary registry. I also use a tracking program to know what changes are made to my system while tinkering. I devote the remainder of my hard drive to GNU/Linux. I have four distributions installed. I have had Mandrake 9.0/9.2 installed for about two years. I always have at least two distros installed to provide me the same “back door” I have with NT4. Recently I added a “poor person’s” install of Knoppix 3.4, VectorLinux 4.3, and Slackware 10.0. Much like my philosophy with Windows, I have divided my GNU/Linux operations into several partitions. I have separate partitions for swap, /boot, /home, /tmp, /usr/local, and /opt. Excepting the Knoppix installation, each distro uses its own /var, /usr, and root partitions. Like my Windows setup, I intend to maintain a second distro installation so I always have a back door into my primary installation. Live CDs are nice, but as long as the hard drive is operable, the second installation is much faster for repair jobs. I also have a FAT32 partition for anything I want to do between the two different operating environments. For chuckles and conversation’s sake I still have a fully functional DOS/WFW 3.11 partition (512 MB). I find quite interesting how fast that operating system is even on my so-called aging hardware. However, the DOS partition is not only for historical purposes. Every blue moon I run some tools such as Symantec’s Ghost or PowerQuest’s Partition Table Editor. Someday I would like to learn how to adapt the Ultimate Boot CD methods so I can add those tools to my own CD. I boot the entire system using GRUB 0.93. I want to update GRUB to version 0.95 so I can boot from CD from within GRUB. My BIOS supports booting from CD, but I like the extra option. I use GRUB to boot from the floppy drive when I test boot floppies and I need not ever toggle my BIOS. I’d like to do the same to avoid those moments when I leave a bottable CD in my drive. I never had much success burning CDs with NT4. Fortunately, I discovered K3B some time ago and I use K3B for most of my CD related tasks. That simple tool keeps me booting to GNU/Linux a few times per month. Currently, however, I use GNU/Linux almost exclusively in educational mode—I am still learning that environment. Although I have toyed with various aspects of GNU/Linux, I remain in NT4 for my meaningful work. I am writing this journal entry from Word 97 and I do not expect that to change any time soon because of the way I have customized my writing environment. No, I do not submit these journal entries to the editor in Word 97 format! As I have mentioned, I depend heavily upon templates and styles. Some time ago I developed a set of macros to help me convert my Word 97 documents into clean HTML. Word 97 was and is notorious for sloppy HTML conversions. One day I got fed up with that and wrote some macros. I use a simple CSS style sheet using similar style names I created in my Word template. This is the type of thing that I dread spending time converting! Finis. |
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