On Tue 20 Mar 2012 10:12:59 NZDT +1300, John Carter wrote:
> Spotted any Billyware on a USB stick lately?
Now that would be a novelty.
But there are optical installation disks which can be inserted in a USB
dvd drive, and there are "recovery disks" that can be created with the
on-disk software and which presumably can also be booted from an
external usb dvd drive.
An Acer Aspire One D270 can create those recovery DVDs ("an external dvd
drive may need to be connected for this process"), but it can also write
to a 12GB USB stick. It has 2 recovery partitions too - 1x 13GB with the
install archives on it, 1x 100MB marked active with a boot loader. It
also doesn't have UEFI...
> There isn't even a CD that comes with these machines. Just a fancy
> microsoft sticker on the underside.
Very common now. Perhaps the presumption is Joe Doe doesn't know how to
reinstall anyway, so might as well save the media cost. Might lead to a
new sale faster...
> So if that partition goes, my only copy of windows goes with it.
I don't see that that neccessarily follows, even assuming one doesn't
have dd.
Can these things boot from the network, PXE style?
Otherwise, thanks for the warning. Maybe a good time to buy a lappie is
now, carefully selecting the new junk to be left in the shop.
Volker
--
Volker Kuhlmann
http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
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