Unreliability of CD Boot.

[Guest Anteaus]

Just a general comment, but wondered what other admins' feelings are on this:

 

In the days of floppies, if you inserted a boot floppy, then the machine

would either boot from the floppy, or else not boot at all. Which was

sensible behaviour.

 

With CD booting, the machine will possibly boot form the CD, but if that

fails then it will boot from the hard-disk instead.

 

This can have several very undesirable consequences:

 

-If the HD is virus-infected (or might be so) not only do you risk exposing

the LAN to the virus, but you have to throw away the CD you were trying to

boot from, as it has no write-protect and therefore may have been

compromised.

 

-If you are preparing a rollout, the preparation will be undone and you'll

have to start all over again.

 

Strikes me that this 'fall-through to HD boot' mechanism is yet another

example of the braindead design which we see so often these days. In the old

days computers were more limited, but what they had was designed to do its

job and work properly. Not so nowadays.

 

Strictly speaking this is a BIOS design-issue, not a Microsoft one, but

thought I'd raise it here anyway.

[Guest Newell White]

"Anteaus" wrote:

<span style="color:blue">

> Just a general comment, but wondered what other admins' feelings are on this:

>

> In the days of floppies, if you inserted a boot floppy, then the machine

> would either boot from the floppy, or else not boot at all. Which was

> sensible behaviour.

>

> With CD booting, the machine will possibly boot form the CD, but if that

> fails then it will boot from the hard-disk instead.

>

> This can have several very undesirable consequences:

>

> -If the HD is virus-infected (or might be so) not only do you risk exposing

> the LAN to the virus, but you have to throw away the CD you were trying to

> boot from, as it has no write-protect and therefore may have been

> compromised.

>

> -If you are preparing a rollout, the preparation will be undone and you'll

> have to start all over again.

>

> Strikes me that this 'fall-through to HD boot' mechanism is yet another

> example of the braindead design which we see so often these days. In the old

> days computers were more limited, but what they had was designed to do its

> job and work properly. Not so nowadays.

>

> Strictly speaking this is a BIOS design-issue, not a Microsoft one, but

> thought I'd raise it here anyway.

> </span>

You are right - it is a BIOS design issue.

And if you press the appropriate Fn key at power-up you will get into the

BIOS configuration menu, which will allow you to nominate which devices, and

in which order, are checked for holding bootable content.

 

--

Regards,

Newell White