In late June of 2004, I was surfing the net when something reminded me of an actress I'd seen a lot on TV in the eighties but didn't remember seeing anywhere since. So I decided to do a search for her name. And got quite a few hits. It seems she's been active, only doing the kind of stuff that doesn't really interest me. But, since I'd found her, I decided to take a closer look. BIG mistake. Now, I wasn't looking for porn sites, or anything else that might be considered stupid or dangerous. I was just following links to the name of a legitimate actress whom I'd seen on network TV (and NOT on NYPD Blue type shows, either). But I ran into some kind of booby trap. Two new shortcuts appeared on my desktop: "o" and "o.bat". Later, I found out that they were connected to a program called infamous_downloader.exe. At the time, all I knew was that they were signs of a hostile invader. Immediately, I cut off power to my computer, not even taking the time for a normal shutdown.

Given the choice, I’d NEVER store ANY data files on the C: drive. Then, if I had trouble booting (due, say, to file corruption), or if I picked up some kind of virus, trojan, spyware, or whatever else this may have been, I could just wipe out that drive and start over. But in this case, I had to boot from a floppy and make a Ghost image of C: before I deleted it (to preserve those data files that the meddling minions of Microsoft won't let me NOT store there) Then, I used Ghost again to restore my previous image (luckily, made not so long before), booted from that and ran an intense virus scan on my data drives.

This experience got me thinking. About how I’d want to do things, and my favorite villain. If not for the enormous pile of intrusive bloatware that is Windows XP, we might have eliminated the hard drive by now (at least for the operating system). Imagine a "firmdrive". Externally, it looks like a hard disk. It's the same size and has the same connections, so it wouldn't require any change in computer hardware design. But internally, it has no moving parts. Just chips. And, once it's set up just the way you want, it can be changed to "read-only". Maybe with a hardware switch, so that no hacker, no matter how ingenious, can EVER create a virus that can write to it unless YOU switch it back first. As for data, that could be stored on separate "firmdrives", or conventional hard drives (maybe even hot-swapable). Or stick memory.

Only a pipe-dream, right? Then, during my dual boot experiments, I ran into something that comes pretty darn close. The SimplyMEPIS 3.3 CD. For that project, I installed MEPIS to a hard drive three times. But I also decided to see what I could do from just the live CD. So I pulled my primary master, installed an empty FAT32 hard drive as the secondary master, and let the CD boot. Then, I started Firefox and tried some downloads:

minislack-0.4.iso 411,777,024 04-02-05 10:06a

yos-i686-2.1.0-4.iso 726,634,496 04-02-05 8:22p

dynebolic-1.4.1.iso 614,039,552 04-02-05 10:40p

puppy-1.0.0alpha2-firefox-multisession.iso 61,241,344 04-02-05 11:47p

Slackware didn't do well in my dual-boot tests. Minislack is a smaller, possibly more newbie-friendly version, so in fairness I thought I'd give it a try. That morning, I couldn't get a decent transfer speed, but I let the first download run anyway, to see if it would complete OK (which it did). Then, I shut everything down and did other stuff for the rest of the day. In the evening, the other downloads went better. Yos is Yoper (Your Operating System), an Australian distribution. I downloaded their previous version last year, but didn't do anything much with it. I'd never heard of dynebolic before, but something about the name caught my fancy. And puppy is a "complete" mini-system that can supposedly save its user settings to multiple sessions on its boot CD-R (not RW) disk.

There were still more releases I wanted to investigate, but I stopped at that point. I had enough files to fill about half a DVD, so it was time for another test. The MEPIS CD was running in my Sony DVD reader (the primary slave). The CD's built-in K3B 0.11.20 CD/DVD writer program recognized my Iomega DVD writer (the secondary slave). I loaded those four files into a project layout, and wrote them successfully to a DVD+RW disk. Then I wrote another copy to a DVD-RW disk. Good so far. I got out four CD-RW disks and burned a CD from each image with no problems. Then it was time to leave.

I shut down the computer and removed the MEPIS CD. Then I booted the computer from each of the four CD-RW disks. Each disk booted just fine, and I’m sure they would have installed correctly if I’d let them. But at that point, I just wanted to see if they could boot. Then I re-installed my regular primary master hard disk and started Windows. Both DVDs were readable by Windows Explorer, and all four files on each one compared equally to the files on the source hard drive (still the secondary master). So I decided to push the envelope. At 3.13 GB, the SUSE DVD image from the dual boot tests was the largest file I had ever downloaded. I put a copy of it on the secondary master, plus all 50 files from my current Nero DVD project. (A 4,478 MB bootable disk. It wasn’t quite the fullest DVD I’d ever made, but it came close). (Nero lists 4,483 MB as the maximum capacity for DVD+R, 4,489 MB for DVD-R). Then I removed the primary master and booted from the MEPIS CD again.

I burned a DVD+RW disk from the SUSE image with no problems. Then, before making the big DVD, I decided to throw K3B a curve. I loaded the SUSE download (as a file) into a new data DVD project and burned it to an ISO9660 CDFS DVD-RW disk. And it worked! That wasn’t what I was expecting. Nero can’t do that. It has to change to the UDF format for files over 2 GB. Had K3B switched without telling me first? I put that question aside and proceeded to the big DVD. I loaded its 50 files and its 13 MB hard drive boot image into a new project layout, and tried to burn it to a DVD-RW disk. And it immediately bombed with a "Fatal error at startup: Input/output error" message. I then tried DVD+RW, DVD-R and DVD+R disks, all with the same result.

So I shut it down and rebooted from the SUSE DVD+RW, which worked fine until I aborted it. Next, I examined the DVD-RW disk under Windows, which could read the disk, identified it as CDFS, and compared the file on the disk to the source file exactly. Finally, I booted from one of my DOS floppies and was able to see the file. So it’s definitely a CDFS disk, because vide-cdd.sys (my DOS boot disk driver) gets a "CDR103: CDROM not High Sierra or ISO-9660 format reading drive" message when it tries to view UDF disks.

So I’ve got two mysteries to solve and seven or eight new operating systems to test before the next issue.