[CentOS] Dual boot box: WinXP & CentOS 5: Impossible to restoreWinXP?

[Nicolas Thierry-Mieg]

Lanny Marcus wrote:
> On Monday, 19 November 2007,  Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.gov wrote:
> <snip>
>> A good toolkit for Windows is the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows  at
>> http://www.ubcd4win.com/
> 
> Phil:I found that Grisoft AVG (I use their free anti-virus program in
> Windows) has a free tool:
> AVG Anti-Rootkit Free
> http://free.grisoft.com/doc/avg-anti-rootkit-free/lng/us/tpl/v5#details
> and I downloaded that.
> 
>> It uses BartPE, discussed earlier, but adds a lot more tools, including
>> rootkit and antivirus scanners.  A clean install after data recovery is
>> still the best bet.
> 
> I'll look into Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, after I get  this box up
> and running again. I will either get that or BartPE. Thanks!
> 
> I recovered the data from the NTFS partition this morning, so I am
> ready to "learn by destroying". The consensus of opinion from Ross and
> you is that I should bite the bullet and do it correctly. Wipe the HD
> and do fresh installs. Time consuming it will be (especially
> installing the Windows aps), but, I will have a better system and I
> will learn. For several months, I've wanted to install/use the free
> VMware Server, but I don't have space on the HD to do much with it
> now. One of the suggestions, from Alain, was to have WinXP running
> virtually, under CentOS. I am contemplating devoting about 75% of the
> HD capacity to CentOS. Installing a lean WinXP in English, and dual
> boot with CentOS, and then install VMware Server and install WinXP in
> English, in virtualization.
> 
> The "KISS" technique (fdisk /mbr, run the anti root kit program,
> reinstall GRUB and restore grub.conf) is tempting and would probably
> work,  and would be much faster, but I still wouldn't have the kind of
> system I will have with the more time consuming approach.
> 
> All the ideas everyone who has responded to this thread have thrown
> into the basket for consideration are deeply appreciated! Lanny
>

I think it's been mentioned in the thread, but since you don't talk 
about this in your summary above: one thing I would recommend is create 
(at least) 2 partitions for MS: a small (5 to 10 G) for the system, and 
a larger one for data.
then use norton/symantec ghost to generate images of your system 
partition, and whenever windows starts fucking up just squash it with 
one of the images. Takes a few minutes to restore a clean winXP, a bit 
longer upgrading drivers and apps and remaking an image if necessary (if 
the latest snapshot was old).
I usually keep several images: post-install without any drivers, that 
plus OS tweaks (shutting off useless MS junk etc), that plus latest 
drivers, and same plus apps.
This works wonders for me! No more headaches with my gaming machines (or 
my friends' and family's PCs ;-) )

you can probably do this with linux tools as well if you don't want to 
buy ghost.

regards,
Nicolas