On Tue, 6 May 2008, Darrell Stec wrote:-

>We are talking over each other. Apparently I do know what I am talking
>about and you don't.

Apparently, you're mixing up virtual machines and real machines.

>Take for instance my HP. When I bought it, WinXP was installed. There is a
>recover partition (newer Vista machines have 3 partitions: Vista -- C:,
>Data -- D:, and a recovery partition) but the computer comes with no
>Windows disks. With my machines and many others I've worked on recently
>you cannot fix a Windows OS using repair. The only option is to use the
>recovery proceedure on the recovery partition that formats the entire C
>drive and reinstalls the computer to its original pristine state.

I've met that sort of situation before. My laptop, and my wife's, came
supplied with that sort of "recovery" media and the first thing they
both required was the burning of a recovery DVD using the contents of
that recovery partition as a basis.

>Now if you have Linux and a virtual machine which I take it runs under
>Linux, how can you install the Windows OS as one of those running under VM?

It might be a problem, depending on whether that recovery system is
configured to only install on specific hardware.

>Remember, the recovery program reformats the hard drive and wipes out the
>Linux too.

Yes it does, but that still won't stop you from being able to utilize
it. All you need is to copy the recovery partition from the physical
hard drive onto an identical partition on the virtual hard drive. Then,
you can restart the virtual machine and use the copy on that to perform
the "recovery" of Windows on the virtual machines hard drive.

The only likely problem you'll have with this is when you discover the
"recovery" system will only work with that specific hardware, and falls
over because the virtual machine emulates something different. Network
cards are a good one for this, as are IDE controllers and emulated
graphics cards.

>And remember you already paid for Windows when you bought the machine. You
>don't get Windows disks. So if you are to run WinXP or Vista on that
>computer you need the disks so you are paying AGAIN for Windows. I don't
>know how to explain this any simpler than that. Perhaps you never worked
>with such a computer. I don't know. Or perhaps your computer does not
>wipe out the entire C: drive.

My wife's system was worse than that. The only recovery option available
was to completely wipe the entire drive, recreate the partitions and
then re-install. The end results were almost as if she'd gotten herself
a fresh machine. All her data that hadn't been backed up, which wasn't
actually a lot really, was lost and she had to reconfigure everything to
her liking again.

Luckily, since then, she's swapped over to Linux and is no longer using
Windows. She feels it's "too slow, too clumsy, and doesn't feel right"
despite having used Windows for years, and Linux for only five months.
In fact, it only took a month before she was complaining about it
auto-booting into Windows and asked me to change it to auto-boot Linux
:-)


Regards,
David Bolt

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