On Aug 26, 5:49 pm, David Brown wrote: [....]
You missed an item here.
Most *nix applications are reasonably robust against errors in the configuration. They generally will give you a hint about where the problem in the xxx.conf is. This is because it is much easier and natural to print something meaningful when the file being read is plain ascii.
Many years back I wrote a DOS application that needed to store a fairly complex configuration into an INI. My solution was, I though at the time a good one:
The program was object oriented and the objects may point to each other etc. Each object needed to be stored and loaded and have the pointers restored without forcing fixed addresses.
I turned the pointers into "name tags" for the objects as I stored them. Each object grew a "store()" method to do the write and a "load()" method for the read. The type of the each object was written as a text string. The result looked like this:
TheObjectType AB_CD_EF_GH ( Item1=12345 Item2="this is some string" ) ... etc ...
[....]Yes you can do that. If you keep a Puppy Linux live CD on hand. Puppy will back up a XP system and a good 50% of the time, you can put back the damaged files. and get it working again.
It is fairly amazing that they were able to reverse engineer the NTFS file system. Microsoft hasn't published a standard for it.
You can even back up and restore a password protected file system. You can take a snapshot of the whole system and put it back to that point.
If some fool sets it up as a "domain log in" machine. It is harder to get it going again. You have to put back the local disk and the directory on the server at the same time.
[....]Make a backup of the disk.
Delete the *.reg and try it.
Put back *.reg and instead delete /windows and try it.
By trying with random collections of the existing files I have managed to get the Windows repair to put basically an whole new install in place.
[.. Microsoft..]I have never found Windows easy to use. For some reason I can almost never double click.