On Mon, 2007-08-27 at 10:04 +0100, ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
In the old days, making a copy of the boot sector was a simple
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/floppy bs=512 count=1
(or whatever the devices might be); the point being that it was the first 512 physical bytes on the drive.
Is that still the case?
Yes but to be honest the best way of protecting yourself is to have bootable recovery media available, because there are plenty of other reasons for the OS not booting than the contents of the boot sector being corrupted. For Vista I would look at options of how you can make the recovery console available without (presumably) having "proper" installation media supplied with your Laptop. As well as being able to fix a stuffed boot sector you can recover from a stuffed registry etc from here (although the same is true from knoppix)
PS I've reckoned since a long time ago (1992) that the biggest mistake M$ made was not going straight for NT. They were already developing NT in 1990/1, and according to info available at the time, as an OS it would have given the PC a good approximation to the power and flexibility of Unix (subject to decent applications being available).
You have to remember that this was a time of great confusion over future direction at MS, they had started with Xenix which was intended to be the way forward, then OS/2 as a joint development with IBM was going to be the way forward (there are even quotes around from Billy G stating that Windows is a dead end and OS/2 is the way forward) Then MS got Dave Cutler, realised that they didn't need IBM anymore and Cutler designed the first released version of NT (Windows NT 3.1) in 1993 which was more or less a hybrid of ideas taken from VMS and OS/2..given the confusion at the time any earlier release wouldn't have been NT it would have been OS/2 (in fact up until 1991 MS were still working on OS/2 3.0)
If NT had come out in 1992, it might have been a very serious competitor to Linux. But NT didn't hit the "consumer" market until last year -- 15 years late.
I'd say that NT hit the consumer market in 2002 when XP was the default installation on almost every new machine sold.
The intention was that this would have been so with Windows 2000 as that was originally designed to be "the one true os", possibly with a cut down version as per XP/Vista Home. Unfortunately MS were very late getting the final API out to driver developers for consumer things like gaming controllers etc. So at the point of release there was next to no support for consumer devices.
At this point MS panicked and cobbled together Windows ME
Previous to that there were some architectural issues I believe as to why NT could not have full DirectX support (beyond the version 3 that was included) Given how MS had pushed out DirecX to game developers, releasing a consumer OS that only had accelerated 3D support using OpenGL would have been a bit of a shot in the foot.