Legacy Computing
Speaking of Windows, attentive reader Evan Anderson pointed out a subtle problem with the drive-recovery techniques I explained in the July column. It seems those old-school DOS-style 8.3 filenames still appear in the Windows Registry entries of (wait for it) Microsoft programs, among others, and simply copying the files back to a drive may not reproduce the correct names. No file copying utility can update file and directory names stored in the Registry, that steaming lump of binary information at the heart of Windows, and any mismatch between Registry entries and actual file names spells catastrophe.
Evan gave a simple example. If you install Microsoft Office before Microsoft MapPoint, the two program directories would be C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~1 and C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2. However, if the file copy program you use to restore the drive proceeds through directories in alphabetic order, it plunks MapPoint in MICROS~1 and Office in MICROS~2. You can imagine the ensuing carnage.
He suggests using the freeware XXCOPY command-line utility (from www.xxcopy .com) to copy FAT filesystems while maintaining their 8.3-format short names. Obviously, this works only for functional filesystems, so it's not clear how it would fare after my slash-and-burn repairs, but it's certainly better than cp.
Based on that, here's the plan for my next Windows box repair. As before, I will dd the entire FAT filesystem to the server, open that file as a loopback drive, and wield the Big Hammer as needed. Then, instead of using cp to copy the files back, I'll dd the filesystem intact onto a blank USB hard drive, jack it into the failed system, boot a Windows rescue disk, and then use XXCOPY to transfer the files.
As nearly as I can tell, the only reason that problem hasn't bitten me yet is sheer, dumb luck. Perhaps you can avoid embarrassment with a quick download, too.
