Lost battle with BootCamp (Summation)


Final summary, at least as far as I am concerned.
************************************************

The best minds in this NGs have tried to make a silk purse out of a
sow's ear, with the free BootCamp beta 1.2

A full installation of Windows XP Pro works well on real PC hardware.

The same "full installation" on a Mac's BootCamp partition leaves a lot
to be desired.

Important low level Windows backup utilities no longer work, such as the
venerable "Ghost" utility, and the even more popular "Drive Image 10"
utility.

Windows utilities like "Shred Agent" do not work either.

If backup utilities like "Ghost" _did_ work, then Shred Agent becomes
important because it radically reduces the size of the backup file,
permitting much quicker restores.

As a result of the crippled installation of XP Pro on a Mac, there is a
big problem with bootable backup and restore of Windows XP Pro, at least
as far as I am concerned.


Therefore I am going to junk the very fast BootCamp, and return to using
the somewhat slower but much more flexible Parallels build 3188.

Windows XP Pro with Parallels is easy for me to backup and restore.

One serious drawback is that there is _still_ no way for me to clear
the free space in the virtual memory file of Windows XP Pro, so the
backups are very bloated and take a long time to restore. (ten to 20
minutes)

If I could find a way to clear free space (not likely) - then that
restore time could be easily reduced to five minutes.


For those many fine people who helped me with issue, my heartfelt thanks.

For the destructive few who spewed only personal attacks, kiss the
smelly brown spot in my wrinkled ass where the sun never shines.

Mark-
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Restore vs Backup
    ... of OS art known as Windows 98 SE had that function. ... >> a floppy or bootable CD and then restore my system to whatever state I ... >> backup, so I can recover from the crash. ... >> state components, but does that follow with a boot floppy creation if I ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain)
  • Re: explorer error
    ... DVD and possibly for live one care for the first backup. ... The only thing I have to do after restore is to re-install ... You may want to consider using Windows Live OneCare as well. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.security_admin)
  • Re: Boot problems
    ... I chose to start windows normally, ... My last backup was 10 ... You now take an image created on the old computer, restore it to the new ... need to perform a repair installation. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Restore vs Backup
    ... Nero is far more than an imaging app, ... functions of the earlier Windows versions. ... command prompt to restore to the last save, which should take care of almost ... I know how to recover a backup copy of the registry from that command ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain)
  • Re: backup options for newly configured Macbook
    ... In the past, working with Windows, I found that it was easy to back up ... With any backup system in the past, the major annoyance for me has been ... in such a way that if the onboard disk died, ... A better way is to use the disk utility's restore feature. ...
    (comp.sys.mac.apps)