Unreliability of CD Boot.

[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.

 

[Newell White]

"Anteaus" wrote:

> 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.
>
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