[Info-vax] Do you (or someone you work with) sysman on Windows?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-12 17:46:20 +0000, Steven Schweda said:

>> [...] Why do they always rebuild the system disk from scratch???

With OS X, that's usually an expeditious approach, as you can 
re-upgrade and reinstall OS X over itself, and *not* lose user 
customizations, nor user settings, nor add-on packages.  Very handy for 
resolving disk corruptions — hard disks can have from three to six hard 
errors per terabyte, per some studies.  Hardware RAID or HBVS helps, 
but not everybody has that configured and available.

With OpenVMS, I've found that clean installs have benefits over 
continuing to upgrade ancient system disks, as well.  There's a whole 
lot less cruft built up in a clean install, and — as you configure the 
clean install — you can create a way to quickly reload the environment, 
too — akin to the cluster-shared files such as SYSUAF and RIGHTSLIST 
that most are familiar with, it can be useful to share 
SYSTARTUP_VMS.COM and related bits.  This means there's a whole lot 
less of a need to back up the OpenVMS system disks, too — occasional 
backups of the system disk with BACKUP /IMAGE after a substantial 
upgrade, or restore the boot disk from distros (via host-based 
InfoServer, preferably) when necessary.  Keep much more frequent copies 
of the locally-tailored files and the authentication database, etc.

>    I know nothing, but I have a dim memory of trying to transplant a 
> Windows XP disk from one system to a different system -- that is, same 
> OS, different hardware.  The disk initially appeared bootable in the 
> new system, but Windows seemed to have the old hardware path to the 
> disk burned into its brain (somewhere in the Registry? -- I don't 
> know), so it
> never got beyond the initial step or two, failing with some 
> uninformative error message.

Microsoft Windows has traditionally configured the boot path at install 
time.  This so that the boot-time processing does not have to detect 
hardware and load drivers.   Also so that your licensed version of 
Windows generally stayed with the system that it was licensed with.   
This is also why some vendors of Windows systems specifically for 
businesses provide longer-term hardware compatibility; a way for a 
business' disk images to be used across a variety of hardware that 
could be acquired over a year or two, or so.    With OpenVMS, the boot 
time processing does detect various devices, which means the bootstraps 
are more complex and are slower.  OS X splits the difference here, and 
caches the last boot sequence as this is much faster, but can also be 
told to boot and configure at boot time.

>    Windows, with its support of nearly unlimited device types, seems to 
> install support for only the immediately required devices on a system 
> during installation, not for all of them.  Thus, moving a disk from one 
> hardware environment to a different one seems to be a major operation.

Older Windows versions could require slipstreaming 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipstream_(computing)> 
<http://lifehacker.com/how-to-slipstream-windows-updates-into-your-installatio-1562956432> 
or cross-platform deployments 
<https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824993.aspx> to do this, 
and which is more complex but does work.

> Installing Windows from scratch on the new system may _seem_ 
> inefficient, unless you've tried doing it the "easy" way.

Ayup.  If you're deploying a lot of these, it's common to create disk 
images, and deploy to virtual machines or to hardware boxes preferably 
with hardware configuration consistency.  Yes, it is possible to 
native-boot guests, too 
<https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825689.aspx>

But then most of the above was the result of a few minutes of 
searching.  I've not particularly used Microsoft Windows in some time.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC