Re: Caught in go-back loop of startup by cquirke
cquirke
Mon Jan 26 14:10:35 CST 2004
On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 14:51:51 -0500, "SaltPeter" >"cquirke (MVP Win9x)"
<cquirkenews@nospam.mvps.org> wrote in message
>> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 22:05:38 -0500, "SaltPeter"
>> >"cquirke (MVP Win9x)" <cquirkenews@nospam.mvps.org> wrote in message
>> >> On Wed, 21 Jan 2004 13:26:12 -0500, "SaltPeter"
>> >> >Note that W2K can't create a FAT32 partition larger than 32 Gigs.
>> >> That does NOT mean you have to use NTFS. It just means you have to
>> >> use a compitent formatter (say, a Win98 boot diskette and Format.com)
>> >> to format the FAT32 volume before installing Win2000.
>> >Tell me something i don't know.
>> More like, tell other posters what they may not know but may be
>> mislead if they read that reply without correction :-)
>And this applies to your comment since there is a reason why W2K doesn't
>allow creation of a FAT32 partition beyong 32 Gig. It's the fundamental
>issue here.
>A partition between 16 G and 32 G uses a 32KB cluster size and 64 sectors
>per cluster in FAT32.
Yes; my 120G G: does indeed have 32m clusters. As it's used mainly
for large files (.MP3s etc.) I'm quite happy with that... in a litrtle
while we will see what the "cost" of that slack space is. Ah:
111 548 936 ... (last 3 digits skipped in all that follows)
116 026 703 ...
Storage efficiency 96%; wasted space 4.5G - not something I'm about to
slash my wrists over. Let's try a few other volumes...
1 957 253 ...
1 973 682 ...
99% efficiency: FAT16 with <gasp> 32k clusters !!
1 515 974 ...
1 951 563 ...
77% efficiency: FAT16 with 32k clusters again
101 759 675 ...
109 074 612 ...
93% efficiency: FAT32 with 32k clusters
>This fact in and by itself is why doing what you propose is not recommended.
>An NTFS partition will use 4 KB clusters up to 16 TeraBytes. Using smaller
>clusters reduces wasted space on hard disks.
There's more to file system choices than slack space; frankly, I'd
rather have my data on larger clusters than have an unaccessible mess
with small clusters (when things go wrong).
Don't get mesmerized by "small clusters is good"; while 4k clusters
are particularly elegant for code paging, there are some upsides to
larger clusters. I deliberately use the larger cluster size via FAT16
to reduce fragmentation of large files (that 99%-efficient volume is
full of pre-installs and backup archives) or increase recoverability
for small files (that often fit in one cluster; that 77%-efficient
volume is full of itsy-bitsy little Office documents)
>Your misleading comment also ignores the infinite advantages that NTFS
>provides other than the waisted space issue. Standard Transaction logging,
>dynamic sector remapping, internal security provider, Disk Quotas, volume
>extensions, distributed link tracking, etc...
Infinite? Yes, there are advantages, but whether they are relevant,
or outweighed by the disadvantages, is moot.
In a nutshell: You'd better hope NTFS's security and safety advantages
work, because if you need data recovery or formal malware management,
you options are drastically curtailed in NTFS.
Let's see how those NTFS features pan out...
1) Security
That's neat when you share a PC with other ppl and you want to keep
user A's eyes out of user B's stuff. Or when you are a corporation
with professionally-administered backup, so you'd rather lose your
live data (<shrug> "restore the backup") than have competitors see it.
That's not useful when you're the sole user of an isolated PC that has
a seldom-used 1.44M "backup device", and something causes data loss.
In this context, "security" becomes just another additional barrier to
getting your data back, e.g. when you find your CD-booted RC can't
access volumes other than C: or do wildcard copies to diskette, and
it's now too late for the arcane registry settings needed to fix this.
2) Transaction rollback
Let's be clear about what transaction rollback does; it reverses
interrupted file operations to a previous state. So let's say you are
99% of the way through saving a 200-page .doc and the PC crashes;
FATxx would leave that data available as a recoverable fragment,
whereas NTFS would utomatically and reversably discard it.
Which sounds more like data loss to you?
Citing transaction rollback as a cure-all for data loss reflects two
bad assumptions:
- you'd rather lose your data than have a bent file system
- interruption of normal file ops are the only problem that occurs
In practice, the most troublesome data loss does not arise from the
interruption of sane file operations (bad exits, etc.). Scandisk
manages those situations in FATxx pretty well; lost cluster chains are
recovered and invalid length files usually get amputated. Because
Scandisk is interactive, you can use it to see what is wrong, but back
out and do manual recovery if you don't trust what it will do. I'd
prefer that to having NTFS throw away my data without asking first.
The more troublesome data loss problems arise due to:
a) INsane file operations, due to bad hardware or deranged code
b) Deliberate hi-level malware attack; "normal" file overwrites
c) Deliberate low-level malware attack; arbitrary disk writes
d) Failing hard drive that can't read arbitrary sectors
In all of the above, NTFS's ability to rollback transactions is
meaningless, because problems (a), (c) and (d) arise beneath NTFS's
level of abstraction (think of pointing to your Medical Personnel
badge when pleading with the sea not to drown you - useless, eh?) or,
in the case of (b), because they are "normal" destructive ops.
In the above cases, your chances of data recovery are considerably
better when the file system is:
- properly documented
- simple enough to understand
- blessed with a maintenance OS that can run a wide range of tools
- supported by a wide range of recovery tools
These, IMO, and good reasons to avoid NTFS - and if it costs me 5% of
my HD capacity to do this, I'd say that's cheap at the price.
BTW, NTFS taketh away as well as giveth, even within its range of
positive features (e.g. security). Read up on Dumaru and another
malware I've forgotton the name of, and NTFS streams.
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Dreams are stack dumps of the soul
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