> OK, Then turn off XP when you're doing backups.

It is always off when I do backups.  For the problem to surface, I
will just have had to run it sometime after I rebooted and before
running dump.

>
> Or, stop trying to talk to the disk directly and move away from the
> "dump" command.

Loe dump.  When I discovered that cutting a DVD would corrupt
your local hard drive (Red Hat since fix it for me), not once
but twice, I used /dump/restore to recover EVERYTHING.  I could
have lost my business!  I am big fan of dump/restore.

> No, that (admittedly funny) comedy sketch was about Vista. I agree
> that your customers should avoid Vista, even in virtualizatoin on
> Scientific Linux. (Do *NOT* put Vista on raw hardware: the stability
> is vastly improvied by using a stabe Linux environment with stable
> drivers and virtualizing it.)

W7 is a good clean up of Vista, but it is still Vista.
I had just finished swallowing some food when I saw the
full show (on Netflix): I could of choked to death!  As
it was, I almost past out from laughing so hard -- my arm
were tingling and I got really light headed.

Just a career note: I am a private contractor.  I exchanged
one boss for about 500 bosses.  If I don't work on what they
want me to (mostly XP), I don't eat.  I am one of the few
computer guys our here that will just tell them the truth
and not evangelize for their favorite technology.  (I do wish
more of them used Linux.  Linux is a blast to work on.  I don't
care much for Apple, though I work on them too -- have to
eat.)  Some do use (swear at) Windows 7, so I do keep up to date.
What a piece of junk!

By the way, if you skip using AHCI and just program the bios
for IDE, you don't even have to use an f6 disk to install XP.
No sign of drivers doing XP in yet.  Although the day will come.

Great letter.  Thank you!

-T

Windows 8 is so, so bad, swear words have yet been created
to express it.  Since M$ now wants to control the hardware
too (Apple style), maybe all computer makers will throw
behind Wine and make Wine such that all Windows programs
will run on it and just dump M$.  Maybe we could get
IBM to lend us some of their old OS/2 developers -- they
had Windows emulation down real well.  About twice as
fast as native windows, as I remember.

I am going to make a lot of money off of W8!