I have failed as an IT Professional
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And how do you install Windows then? With the "we'll get rid of 10GB of your HD so we can keep our Windows backup here"? I mean, a restoration image.
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I use a Chinese off-brand USB DVD drive I bought at like Target or maybe Fred Meyer for like $40. I've had it for years now.
It also doesn't require special burning software because it's a bog-standard USB optical storage device, unlike whatever the hell Weng ended up with.
I tried to put 8.1 on a USB memory stick, but I didn't have any quite large enough. Fortunately, I still have a stack of old blank DVDs leftover from the last time I burned them regularly in like 2009 or whenever.
I personally use mine to rip CDs or install games I have lying around.Although ... I could just as well use an external one, I guess.
I actually had one put in my desktop because 1) I don't have any other Blu-Ray drives in the house (well, now I own a Xbox One but I didn't at the time), and 2) it was like a incremental cost of like $10. Turns out I've never once needed a Blu-Ray drive for anything other than Xbox One games, which my actual Xbox One seems to handle just fine.
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I think I just unpacked the files, started setup.exe and installed Windows 8 to the partition I was installing it from, over the OS I started the installation in. But then it didn't give me sufficient permissions to delete Windows.old, so maybe it would have been better to make a dedicated partition for the installer and wipe out Win7.
I use http://slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html for the non-OS install case; it's free, lightweight, and has worked for almost everything.
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The least gotcha-laden way to set up Windows these days, as it has been since Windows 98, is to do it from optical media.
I would agree. Where I fail as an IT professional is that I burn the DVD and forget to label the damned thing, so the next time I need to do an identical operation I burn yet another DVD. I have a huge stack of mystery DVDs that I really should go through and label.
I use a Chinese off-brand USB DVD drive I bought
Likewise.
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@Intercourse said:
Where I fail as an IT professional is that I burn the DVD and forget to label the damned thing
Me too, which is why I like my emulator so much. Not needing the actual burn step is nice too.
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If this is the easy way to install Windows these days, then MS has done an excellent job on moving users to the other platforms.
So, how does the almighty Linux resolve the problem of burning an ISO to a USB stick?
Sure, installing XP might be tricky, and even Win7 had some gotchas, but now that MS outright supports USB installs, the hardest part is actually getting the damn drive to boot. Which is as hard as anywhere.
I think I just unpacked the files, started setup.exe and installed Windows 8 to the partition I was installing it from, over the OS I started the installation in.
The fact that it even let you start is TRWTF.
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Oh you are one of those idiots.
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It's only from our mistakes that we get to learn. As such, I'm a very learned man.
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This post is deleted!
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@Intercourse said:
Where I fail as an IT professional is that I burn the DVD and forget to label the damned thing, so the next time I need to do an identical operation I burn yet another DVD. I have a huge stack of mystery DVDs that I really should go through and label.
I've done the same, except seemingly at some point in the past I decided that the perfect place to store the burned, unlabelled DVDs was in the same spindle tub as the blank DVDs.
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So, how does the almighty Linux resolve the problem of burning an ISO to a USB stick?
Really? I'm not even gonna bother but there are like 5 different ways I can think of installing Linux from a USB drive.
Listen, if it's one thing in which Windows can't compete with Linux (or any BSD for that matter) is in how easy and flexible Linux install process is. And don't come here nagging about webcam, video or audio drivers because that's not part of it.
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My favourite Win7 Installation Gotcha was installing it from a USB onto a laptop which has stopped recognising the Optical Drive. (I could just get an external one, but ehn).
Whenever I use this USB to install Win7, it will fail because it tries to make the System Partition on the USB Drive, and I can't persuade it otherwise.
The solution to this I found is to use the USB to get the system into the preinstallation environment, bring up the Command Prompt, use Diskpart to make a small partition at the start of the drive, copy the Win7 installation media onto that partition, and reboot, so the Laptop would install from the hard disk and make the System Partition in the right place.
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I've done the same, except seemingly at some point in the past I decided that the perfect place to store the burned, unlabelled DVDs was in the same spindle tub as the blank DVDs.
This is why I stopped burning my ISO's to CD/DVD long time ago.
OTOH, those pens/markers to write in DVD's are expensive shit.
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And don't come here nagging about webcam, video or audio drivers because that's not part of it.
Sure OS installation has nothing to do with drivers. If you like being stuck at 800x600 and don't use sound. WTF for a shitty argument is that? If one OS has an installer that handles getting as many as possible device correctly up and running and an other OS that doesn't then that is not a point of comparison?
Mind you I'm not even claiming modern *nix has this problem. But it is just retarded claiming that drivers are of no concern during OS installation.
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Really? I'm not even gonna bother but there are like 5 different ways I can think of installing Linux from a USB drive.
And very much same for Windows. The only difference is that you don't get
ddout of the box.Listen, if it's one thing in which Windows can't compete with Linux (or any BSD for that matter) is in how easy and flexible Linux install process is. And don't come here nagging about webcam, video or audio drivers because that's not part of it.
The easiest installer is the one that does nothing, eh?
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So, how does the almighty Linux resolve the problem of burning an ISO to a USB stick?
cp netinstall.iso /dev/sdb
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Sure OS installation has nothing to do with drivers
Jeez! Of course it does, but it's not relevant to the subject at hand.
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The easiest installer is the one that does nothing, eh?
No, the easiest installer is generally the one released most recently, run against a motherboard that was available before the installer's release - mainly because that's the one most likely not to need extra driver installation steps afterward.
MS got its default Windows installation process right with Windows 7, and all the Linuxes have had nice installers for long enough that arguing about deficiencies in the OS installation process is now just pointless (though traditional) bickering. They're all good enough now.
Installation of missing drivers on Windows is generally easier than on Linux, where the lazy sysadmin's approach is simply to wait for a kernel version that has them all baked in. Where the Linux distro installers really shine, though, is in the way they result in a box with a comprehensive, well-integrated, ready-to-run application suite along with the OS. With Windows, the only readily available way to get anything close to that in a single step is to use your PC manufacturer's installation image, and what you usually end up with is a poorly curated set of system-crippling advertising-heavy upsell-crazy bloatware that calls for immediate stripping down.
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OTOH, those pens/markers to write in DVD's are expensive shit.
You can use them for other things too. I find they're good for labelling bags of food bound for the freezer. That helps avoid the need to play “mystery meat roulette” at mealtimes.
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With Windows, the only readily available way to get anything close to that in a single step is to use your PC manufacturer's installation image, and what you usually end up with is a poorly curated set of system-crippling advertising-heavy upsell-crazy bloatware that calls for immediate stripping down.
Remember what happened the last time Microsoft tried to bundle something with Windows?
Yeah. Trust me, if they tried creating a well-integrated ready-to-run application suite, they'd get assraped by lawyers.
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Yeah. Trust me, if they tried creating a well-integrated ready-to-run application suite, they'd get assraped by lawyers.
And politicians. EU Commission would eat them alive.
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Seems to me that if they were to make available a single Windows Appliance installer including everything that comes with current Windows installers plus a consumer-level version of Office, sold at something very close to the same price they charge for both licences bought separately, then no reasonable court could support any accusation of abuse of market power - even if the bundle included a nicely curated set of ancillary non-MS applications.
Where they might get into trouble is if they started making deals with hardware makers giving them heavy discounts on Windows Appliance not also available to the general populace. Especially if those discounts were conditional on those OEMs refusing to sell equipment that didn't ship with Windows Appliance.
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My favourite Win7 Installation Gotcha
My favorite WinXP Installation Gotcha was the disk bluescreening halfway through the install, reliably: after wiping my partition but before getting enough to have a working system on the drive.
And that's how I got into Linux!
Filed under: Linux: Not Even Once
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So, how does the almighty Linux resolve the problem of burning an ISO to a USB stick?
by doing this (and making doubly tripply absolitely sure that you have the path of the USB drive correct before you hit enter, or you just nuked one of your hard drives. (with great power comes great danger.)
sudo dd if=/path/to/iso/image of=/path/of/usb/drive bs=1MAlso note that this is perhaps not the fastest nor most intuitive syntax, see later replies for alternatives
Editing on the suggestion of @flabdablet
I have never really understood this attachment to dd,
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CLI?
That's too hard for Windows users!
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... so they put a fancy front end around dd? figures.
one of the many reasons that i dislike Ubuntu proper and stick to xubuntu or lubuntu when i use an ubuntu variant at all, which thanks to Arch and Debian is rarely
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I have never really understood this attachment to dd, especially since so many people fail to add the bs=1M argument to make it run at a reasonable speed. A simple
cp /path/of/iso/image /path/of/usb/driveis way faster than dd without bs=1M, doesn't need the weird-ass if= and of= prefixes that mess up tab completion, and doesn't crap up your terminal afterwards with useless cruft about the number of blocks transferred.cat /path/of/iso/image >/path/of/usb/driveworks fine too, which means that if you've got a large ISO image stored in pieces on e.g. FAT32 media, you can write it out to the USB stick withcat /path/of/iso/image-part* >/path/of/usb/drive.
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I have never really understood this attachment to dd
As i understand it it's because some versions of
cpdon't support that (in particular the version builtin to busybox didn't support that till earlier this year)of course that logic doesn't stand up to
cat, and sincecatis basically required for linux to boot i'm not sure why it isn't the canonical way to do that...probably has some
hystericalhistorical reason for it. I used dd in my example because it is still the canonical way to do it in pretty much every distribution.
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I thought the Canonical way was the thing I linked to ...
you have no idea how much it annoys me that the organization that runs ubuntu decided to call themselves Canoncial....
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bluescreening halfway through the install, reliably: after wiping my partition but before getting enough to have a working system on the drive
That one's often due to having your SATA disk controller set to AHCI mode, rather than IDE mode, in the BIOS settings. The initial part of XP Setup that does the initial partitioning and file transfer stuff runs in real mode, using INT 13h for disk transfers (this is built into the BIOS and works regardless of controller mode) then reboots from the new partition to launch an NT kernel to do the rest of it. That kernel talks directly to the disk controller hardware, bypassing the BIOS; and the one that comes with XP Setup does not include native drivers for AHCI controllers.
Most controller manufacturers will offer F6 drivers (here are some from Intel) but for XP Setup the process for using those is kind of farcical. The only officially supported way involves an actual floppy drive (USB sticks don't work). On machines without a floppy drive, you have to slipstream the necessary drivers into a custom XP Setup disc built with something like nLite.
If you can't find F6 drivers for your controller, then as far as I know the only way to make AHCI mode work is to do the initial XP setup with your mobo controller set to IDE mode; then install a PCI or PCIE SATA controller card with a second hard drive attached, boot into Windows and install the device drivers for those; then shut down, switch the Windows drive to the plug-in card, and boot it (at which point Windows should find the driver and install it for its boot disk, rather than giving up with a blue screen); then shut down, switch the mobo controller to AHCI mode in the BIOS, start up again, and install the mobo SATA controller driver; then shut down, reconnect the Windows boot drive to a mobo SATA port, and start up again.
Which is why I always have a bit of a chuckle whenever some know-it-all blowhard gets on a tear about how hard it is to get missing device drivers into Linux
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As i understand it it's because some versions of cp don't support that
Maybe. All I know is I've been using cp for this job since the first version of Linux I ever had my hands on (Red Hat 7 in 2000) and it's always worked for me.
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... Tried to update Windows instead.
Windows Update routinely breaks itself if you aren't updating regularly. For some reason, they think it's better for you to have to google an error and find a FixIt or whatever that updates the updater instead of just updating it first and then carrying on.
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thanks to Arch and Debian
I've never played with Arch. I stayed with Red Hat until 9, then switched to Ubuntu Breezy; used Gnome on Ubuntu until the bugfuck insanity revealed itself with Lucid, at which point I jumped ship to Debian Testing; on being completely blindsided by the unexpected arrival of Gnome 3 after a careless
aptitude full-upgradeI experimented briefly with Mate before settling on Xfce with Debian Testing, which I'm still quite happy with. I also run a handful of headless Debian Testing servers.Does Arch offer anything compelling enough to make a satisfied Debian Testing user consider switching?
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not really, it's compiled with a bunch more optimizations turned on and will occasionally break itself like crazy if you do a careless full update after waiting too long, or not staying up to date on known breaking packages that have to be treated with care while updating.
I pretty much only use it for temporary machines when i'm more concerned with making it run faster and not about longevity.
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Windows Update routinely breaks itself
Yep. That's why I use and recommend the third-party WSUS Offline Update alternative. It relies on Windows Update to some extent, but only to figure out what updates are missing from the client machine; the most fragile part of WU - the actual downloading of updates - gets completely bypassed.
If you've got two or more Windows boxes to keep up to date, it's wonderful.
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bookmarking this for future investigation.
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That's the second problem I've seen in laptops in recent years involving the disk controller's mode in the BIOS.... WTF is up with that?
(I've since gotten a new laptop that runs Windows 7, but it has its own problem with bluescreens)
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WTF is up with that?
Windows likes to bypass the bios and fails utterly
ifwhen it doesn't have the right drivers rather than using the bios and only bypassing it if an appropriate driver can be found?I've run into so much trouble with that.
another fun thing is those fingerprint scanners in laptops. I've on more than one occasion lsot functionality of those things because the device maker NEVER released drivers to the public and so when i reformatted the machine for one reason or another there was no way for me to get the drivers for the device and so it would never work again.
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I've only ever used fingerprint scanners on Acer laptops, and Acer does offer downloadable drivers for those.
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fails utterly ifwhen it doesn't have the right drivers rather than using the bios and only bypassing it if an appropriate driver can be found?
To be fair, diving in and out of Real Mode in order to do disk I/O a block at a time via INT 13h is so much slower than talking to hardware via a suitable device driver that it would make Windows perform completely unacceptably.
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Acer and Asus do offer drivers for those, Dell does too but not for all versions of OS.
also the fingerprint drivers are weird as hell, they've been known for them to break if you have the wrong service pack installed.
i had a dell that i used the fingerprint scanner on as a convenience and it broke totally when i installed SP3 for XP. and neither the vendor nor Validity (the chip manufacturer) ever released an updated driver
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To be fair, diving in and out of Real Mode in order to do disk I/O a block at a time via INT 13h is so much slower than talking to hardware via a suitable device driver that it would make Windows perform completely unacceptably.
I agree that windows should prefer a driver, yes. but i do not agree that it should absolutely require one, particularly when adding drivers to the initial install is suck a pain in the ass.
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I agree that windows should prefer a driver, yes. but i do not agree that it should absolutely require one, particularly when adding drivers to the initial install is suck a pain in the ass.
I don’t think a real mode disk driver would have helped. It would probably be too slow to even install the system in a reasonable time, have trouble handling large disks, and suffer compatibility problems because of BIOS bugs.
Windows XP came out in 2001, before SATA was even invented. I think it’s a bit unfair to criticize it for not running on SATA computers in AHCI mode. After all, a Linux system from that era would have the very same problems...
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I don’t think a real mode disk driver would have helped. It would probably be too slow to even install the system in a reasonable time, have trouble handling large disks, and suffer compatibility problems because of BIOS bugs.
maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't have. I'm still going to be annoyed that the installer allowed you to partition, format, and copy install files to a drive that it could then completely fail to see when it came time to actually install the OS to.
Either allow use of Real mode in both parts of the installer or allow it in neither. don't waste my time getting halfway through an install that i then could not continue and now have destroyed a perfectly working install of whatever was on the disk before i started the install of XP.
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That's perhaps a little harsh. I've written enough boot loaders to know a bit about looking at hardware on different levels of abstraction, and there's a world of gotchas there. And it's not completely unreasonable to conceive of the first stage of XP Setup, which includes the partitioning and initial boot image setup, as an extended and somewhat interactive boot loader.
This kind of thing is a generally hard problem. In the Linux world, you see analogues where an entire installation runs apparently to completion, but the result fails to boot - perhaps GRUB doesn't load properly, or GRUB can't find the kernel image and initrd, or the initrd can't find the root filesystem.
At least with the way XP Setup is structured, you find out fairly quickly that a doomed thing will in fact die; most of XP Setup runs on the very same kernel that the final system will, booted from the very same partition that the final system will boot from, so if XP Setup runs to completion there's a very good chance that what it makes will actually work.
Windows 7 Setup is theoretically safer in that it doesn't touch the destination disk at all until it's managed to start a working NT kernel. Even so, there are enough differences between the boot sequence starting from optical media and the sequence starting from a hard drive that I have still seen it make an occasional non-bootable installation.
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That's perhaps a little harsh. I've written enough boot loaders to know a bit about looking at hardware on different levels of abstraction, and there's a world of gotchas there. And it's not completely unreasonable to conceive of the first stage of XP Setup, which includes the partitioning and initial boot image setup, as an extended and somewhat interactive boot loader.
It's not the two stages that i mind, nor the possibility of nonbootable system that annoys me. it's the fact that it would have been entirely possible to determine before it got around to partitioning and formatting the disks that the result would be nonbootable.
it is a very dificult thing to determine if an installation of anything is absolutely going to succeed before writing a single byte to disk, but it should, and is possible, to determine of the install will be able to read the disk after partitionaing/formatting it before one partitions and formats it.
windows 7 and up do this by loading the NT kernel and having it do the partitioning and formatting, probably precisely because of this issue, likewise does Linux, since just about forever. In both of those cases it is known 100%* that the destination disk will be available to the installer after formatting, but the same is not true in XP.
*) baring any catastrophic event such as spontaneous HDD explosion or power failure.
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Yeah. When the SP1 manual installer failed, it linked to a kb fix that literally, I shit you not, overwrites all system files that SP1 depends on with the expected version.
Why not just do that in the SP1 installer?
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it should, and is possible, to determine of the install will be able to read the disk after partitionaing/formatting it before one partitions and formats it.
You'd think so, but if you're working from a real-mode environment where all the information you can get about what drives are available comes via BIOS calls, you can never be 100.0000% certain that the disk you're about to partition and format is definitely a real disk and definitely attached to any given hardware controller. You only get to find that out after booting something that knows how to probe the hardware directly, and the only truly safe thing to use for that is the kernel you're going to finish up running under, booted from the partition it will end up booting from once live.
The corner cases where this kind of stuff breaks down are all perfect chicken-and-egg dilemmas. Fortunately, in the overwhelming majority of installations they will never arise. But there are certainly more of them if you're working with hardware that didn't exist before the setup code you're using was released.
