transparently re-letter hot-backup boot-partition?

[nusrat]

i'm running w2k-pro on a corporate win-server network, in a company where
it's not unusual for your desktop system to be down or crippled for days
because of some software change which was forcibly "pushed" to your machine
remotely by the Network/PC Support department.

i'd like to know a procedure to:
(a) re-partition my 256gig IDE HD -- in-place -- into 2 equal parts

(b) be able to use the second partition as a bootable hot-backup,
on which i *manually* control which changes on the "normal"
boot-part get replicated to the backup -- not just by date/time range,
but also by specifying specific folders/files to be omitted/included

(c) be able to boot and run from the second part,
with ALL code thinking that the booted partition
is addressed as "c:\" -- including the Support department's
network logon scripts which run at boot-time.

(d) still be able to access both partitions,
no matter which one i've booted from.

-- opening the PC's case isn't an option.
-- the drive currently has only one partition, a full-drive primary,
i.e. with no "extended"/"logical" partitions.
-- i'm not concerned about my non-system win .lnk files
being made "stale" due to drive-letter changes
-- i don't mind if the solution involves creating a third partition
which must be booted briefly to "fix"/hack something on the
other partition(s) before switching between backup & "normal" mode.
-- the bios set-up screen on this machine (a late-model dell)
allows switching the order of devices used to attempt booting.

i'd also like to ask how the solution would be different
if i were using two separate IDE drives.

tia,
kate

[c***@nospam.com]

Post by nusrat
i'm running w2k-pro on a corporate win-server network, in a company where
it's not unusual for your desktop system to be down or crippled for days
because of some software change which was forcibly "pushed" to your machine
remotely by the Network/PC Support department.
(a) re-partition my 256gig IDE HD -- in-place -- into 2 equal parts
(b) be able to use the second partition as a bootable hot-backup,
on which i *manually* control which changes on the "normal"
boot-part get replicated to the backup -- not just by date/time range,
but also by specifying specific folders/files to be omitted/included
(c) be able to boot and run from the second part,
with ALL code thinking that the booted partition
is addressed as "c:\" -- including the Support department's
network logon scripts which run at boot-time.
(d) still be able to access both partitions,
no matter which one i've booted from.
-- opening the PC's case isn't an option.
-- the drive currently has only one partition, a full-drive primary,
i.e. with no "extended"/"logical" partitions.
-- i'm not concerned about my non-system win .lnk files
being made "stale" due to drive-letter changes
-- i don't mind if the solution involves creating a third partition
which must be booted briefly to "fix"/hack something on the
other partition(s) before switching between backup & "normal" mode.
-- the bios set-up screen on this machine (a late-model dell)
allows switching the order of devices used to attempt booting.
i'd also like to ask how the solution would be different
if i were using two separate IDE drives.
tia,
kate

What you're proposing may violate your company policy. Normally I'm
on the network admin side of things so I understand the need to
constantly push security updates and patches. But I've also seen
incompetent people doing this and routinely killing machines (for you
Navy folks, I'm referring to NMCI).

With that said, try removing the domain admins from the admins group
and dsiable any SUS or management software. That will prevent them
pushing updates. You will not be able to prevent them from putting
stuff in the logon scripts, though. For that create a seperate local
admin account and remove your account from the admins group. That way
the logon scripts can't install anything that requires admin rights.

You could simply run frequent backups or go-back software that would
allow a quick recovery. I'm trying out Acronis TrueImage and it seems
to work very well.

-Chris

[nusrat]

What you're proposing may violate your company policy . . .
But I've also seen incompetent people . . . routinely killing machines
. . . try removing the domain admins from the admins group
and dsiable any SUS or management software. That will prevent them
pushing updates . . .

chris, thx, but i'm not trying to keep them from pushing updates --
which would definitely be an even more egregious violation of
corp policy than anything i'm suggesting.

i'm just trying to give myself a way to recover and still get my work done
when they screw-up:
the person in the cube next to me was completely dead-in-the-water
for 2 days, then running crippled in win's "netless" recover mode
for several more days, and then still not completely "right"
for at least an additional week.

my prior post probably didn't explain very well:
when i said "manually control", i didn't mean "control what they push to me";
i meant that i want to control *which* of their updates
get copied to my "personal fall-back partition" by any such utility
as TrueImage, GoBack, etc.

the biggest obstacle i'm anticipating in this whole plan,
is, how do i create and config this 2-partition setup
in a way so that
(a) booting from either allows access to the data on both, and
(b) booting from either results in the *booted* partition
being addressed as "c:\" ?

as i said before in my (overly-long) post,
i don't mind if the solution involves creating a third partition
which must be booted briefly to "fix"/hack something on the
other partition(s) before switching between backup & "normal" mode.

any ideas?
tia again,
kate