On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Ray Davison <ray...@charter.net> wrote: > dmccunney wrote: > >>> Oh by the way if you want to install XP on FAT32, it will work without >>> being activated. >> >> XP on FAT32? <shudder> > > Why the shudder? I have never run WXP on anything but FAT32. Currently > it is on four machines in the office plus whatever is in the shop. It > is a matter of cross-platform access; everything can use FAT32, share > data, and perform maintenance.
Why the shudder? Dead easy. FAT *sucks* as a file system. The advantage is that it's well understood and widely implemented, and just about everything knows how to read it. The disadvantage is that it's the opposite of robust, lacks redundancy, lacks any notion of rights and permissions because there's no place in the file system to store the needed metadata, and $DIETY help you if you ever have bad file system damage. I've spent way too much time over the years trying to repair damaged FAT file systems. Have a problem? Run CHKDSK. CHKDSK will find an assortment of lost clusters, and give them names like FILE0000.CHK in a FOUND.000 directory. Can you actually do anything with them? Unlikely - they probably aren't complete and are unusable. Your normal option is to simply delete them, and the FOUND.000 directory. Were they parts of something important that is now truncated and broken? Too bad, and you better have a backup copy of whatever got trashed. I use NTFS on Win2K and XP, and would not use anything else. Why? It's robust. On the infrequent occasions NFTS has problems, CHKDSK simply fixes them, and puts everything back under it's right name in it's proper location. The only time I ever saw that *not* happen was when a directory entry happened to be sitting on a bad block. CHKDSK collected the files under their right names and assigned them to a FOUND.000 directory. All I had to do was rename the directory to what the original had been. It supports rights and permissions. 2K and XP introduced the concept that there may be more than one user on the machine, and NTFS provides storage for the metadata to specify what user owns what files and what permissions that user has. Through XP, Windows used the assumption that the user of the machine was the Administrator with all powers to do everything. That changed in Vista/7/8, and by default, the user is *not* Administrator. That was a security measure. as many exploits that target windows require administrator privileges to do their dirty work, and bounce off if the user is *not* running as Administrator. Under XP, you can create a Power User (XP Pro) or Limited User (XP Home) userid that works the same way, but you must be under NTFS for it to work. It supports links. Under Unix, a directory entry doesn't point to a file. It points to a kernel maintained data structure called an inode, that holds the information on the file's owner, owner's group, permissions, and creation/access times, plus pointers to the actual blocks on disk where the file resides. This permits a level of indirection. You can have the same file appear in more than one directory, or appear under several different names in the same directory. The Unix vi editor is an example. Ex is the line editor. Vi is the full screen editor. View is a read only file viewer. All three are links to the same underlying program. It looks to see what name it was called by, and behaves accordingly. You can have hard links, which are all on teh same file system, or symbolic links, which can span file systems. A symbolic link is similar in concept to a Windows shortcut, but more powerful. It's a pointer to a file or directory on another file system, and the OS follows it an opens the file. You have to do some digging to discover that something *is* a symlink. NTFS5 supports hard links, and under Vista/Win7/Win8, symbolic links. A Japanese developer wrote a driver that provides symlink support under 2K and XP as well. I make use of this. NTFS supports compression, on a directory basis. I make extensive use of this. NTFS supports encryption, on a directory basis. I multiboot Windows, Linux, and FreeDOS. Windows is on NTFS. Linux is on ext4. FreeDOS is on FAT32. Linux has native support for NTFS, and can see the Windows partition and access stuff on it. I found an open source driver for Windows that lets it read/write the Linux ext4 partitions. Windows and Linux can both read/write the FAT32 partition. FreeDOS can only see its own parition, but I don't *care*. I have no need to access Windows or Linux files from FreeDOS. If WinXP on FAT32 works for you, fine. I wouldn't touch it with a stick. Too much of what I'm accustomed to doing simply can't be done on FAT32. FAT originated in the days when hardware was much less powerful, and the sort of file systems on larger systems weren't possible. They have been on PCs for quite some time, and I see no reason not to take advantage of them. I have no need to restrict myself to a lowest common denominator file system everything can read, since I can read pretty much anything from Linux and Windows. > Ray ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free." http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
