In
glee said:
No user compiling is involved in running a Live CD, so I don't see how
that is relevant. The user downloads the .iso, burns the image to a
CD or creates the bootable USB drive. Done.
Oh compiling the source code is very relevant! As here is were you can
choose to have the live distro use the Windows swapfile or not if found.
Once it is compiled, it is too late to change it.
You stated you used an Ubuntu Live CD and this happened... I've been
using Ubuntu Live CDs for some time and have never seen this behavior.
Tell me in what version you saw this behavior, I'll download and make
the Live CD or USB stick, and see if the behavior you report is
reproduced. It hasn't been in any of the versions I have used.
I just posted all of the details to Philo in this very subthread just
yesterday. In fact, a few minutes before my post to you which you just
replied too. I think the key is having US Robotics iband installed (it's
free). Without it, I probably would have never known Ubuntu Live was
messing around in the Windows partition.
Paul also mentioned back in March of 2011, that he had caught the Live
distros poking around where they shouldn't be as well. Here is the
repost below.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: Paul <
[email protected]>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Subject: Re: Windows not load
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:48:02 -0400
I did that Paul! Although Windows XP was running fine, I just wanted
to try Linux Live. After all I was told it wouldn't hurt a thing.
WRONG! Linux Live toasted my Windows XP install! And after hundreds of
hours of investigation it turns out that Linux Live really touches
your Windows XP install. Oh it sounds harmless and all, as all it
wants is to borrow the Windows swap file for its own purpose.
The problem was that I was running Windows XP on a SSD. And excessive
writes kills SSD. So I turned off the XP swap file. Ubuntu Live in
return gets mad and toasts your Windows install.
So I think you should warn people Paul. So others don't make the same
mistake that I had.
I can't report I've had a similar experience.
But my systems have nothing but hard drives.
The only practice I don't approve on, from the Linux community, is
"scanning" of drives as part of the startup sequence. Some LiveCD
distros, are known to "search" for a copy of the image you're booting
from. Presumably the purpose, is to do a loopback mount of the image,
as a replacement for accessing the CD itself. But I still don't
approve of monkey-business. A LiveCD should just mind its own business.
If you have a "toasted install", it sure would be nice to tell us what
got toasted, so we can judge the mechanism.
The older releases of Knoppix (5 series), used to bring up foreign
file systems read-only, as a precaution. (You had to tick something
in a dialog to go read/write.) But newer releases enable read/write
(presumably because the NTFS driver is now more trusted than it used to
be).
And yes, I have seen re-use of the page file. The Kaspersky scanner,
which is based on Gentoo, seems to like to use the Windows pagefile
for swap. The easiest way to tell this, is to use the "top" command,
and see how much swap is evident in the display. Then, correlate that
with the size of pagefiles on your various partitions. It's not really
a big deal, but also not the best practice I can think of.
I've worked with plenty of older LiveCDs, where they don't provide swap
automatically
(because there may be no place to put it), and if the OS is then put
under
memory pressure, the OS will crash. (It seems at least a few LiveCDs,
have had poor tuning of a couple of kernel parameters. I've noticed
that improved on some of them, so somebody figured it out.) If you're
using one of the older LiveCDs, then either do your own "swapon", or at
least watch with vmstat, how full you're getting.
Paul
