The Hidden Treasures of Sysinternals 356
Barence writes "PC Pro contributing editor Jon Honeyball has written a nice feature on the latest treasures to be found on the Windows Sysinternals website. Among them are a tool for creating virtual hard disks from physical drives, a hard disk read-write monitoring tool, and a utility for putting ISO images onto flash drives. They're free, but they're effective."
Disk2vhd vs SelfImage (Score:4, Interesting)
I used SelfImage [excelcia.org] recently to dd [die.net] a windows 2003 box to an LVM-based virtual machine on Proxmox [proxmox.com], a Debian-based Virtual Machine Server. Worked a treat. While I see the benefit of created a Microsoft VHD if you're an MS shop, we're a mix so being able to pump a live physical disk into a remote logical volume was great.
Is time for multidesktop for windows? (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the reasons I can't use Windows for real work is because of the lack of multidesktop. For me is very important the ability to switch from one desktop to other, never having the screen of the taskbar cluttered, having my "graphic things" open in a desktop, and my "programming things" in other. I can't understand how people can work withouth it. Is like browsing withouth tabs, only worse :-)
I know that there are a few free and now free tools that try to provide MD to windows, but all falls flat. The guy behind sysinternals tried to, and was almost a success, but nope. It seems theres some architecture limit that stop this thing to work smoothly on windows, but that is just natural on the X system.
This and the horrible console that Windows have, makes working with windows infuriating.
Wonderful tools (Score:5, Interesting)
These have been available for a long time, used to just be from a site called Sysinternals run by Russonivich before Microsoft hired him. This guy is, literally, the person who wrote the book on Windows. Windows Internals is the current name, used to be called Inside Windows 2000. A wonderful technical document of the internal workings of Windows.
At any rate, Russonivich produces extremely useful tools. Not the sort of thing you want in the hands of inexperienced users, as many of them can break your system, but extremely powerful. I use them all the time in the course of my job, especially when there's manual malware removal that needs to be done. So far, malware is unaware of the ability to suspend a process, which Process Explorer will do. So you suspend the malware, its watcher process doesn't know to restart it. You then use autoruns to remove the startup entries. At that point you can reboot, it won't start, and you can clean up the residuals.
Re:It's all stuff that ships with Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
I hate to say this, but you were generous indeed... (I was hoping for more!!!)
http://www.canalys.com/pr/2009/r2009112.html [canalys.com]
But.. even 2-3% means many millions of devices... ;)
Re:Duh (Score:3, Interesting)
And here I thought that Mark got hired to turn Windows Vista into Windows 7. ( I have no idea, but it was my thought at the time that they bought the best kernal hacker out there to redo Vista. )
Glad to see that not only are Marks old free tools still free, but that Microsoft is allowing new tools of his to be free also. Very un-microsoft of microsoft.
Re:the iso to usb tool only accepts win7 isos (Score:5, Interesting)
There are no silver-bullet solutions for booting ISOs via USB. A silver-bullet solution requires doing "floppy emulation", which is something that can't be easily done in a general-purpose way. For CD booting, each BIOS has this functionality implemented differently. For USB booting, the bootloader has to figure out how to do this. MEMDISK [zytor.com] and GRUB4DOS [boot-land.net] are the only ones I know that do floppy emulation.
But then you have to do CD drive emulation too.
The way almost all ISO=>USB booters work is to pull the pieces apart and make them work without floppy+CD drive emulation. But this requires intimate knowledge of how that ISO normally boots, and thus it can't be a silver-bullet solution.
Re:Duh (Score:1, Interesting)
"The Hidden Treasures of Sysinternals"
Why are they hidden? This is the sort of thing that should be documented. Of course, MS documantation is completely lame. Half the time when I hit F1 trying to find out how to do something in MS Access, it points me to a nonexistant menu item. It makes me think of the late Lilly Tomlin's "Ernestine the telephone operator" -- "We're the phone company. We don't HAVE To."
People badmouth Linux docs, but I have a far easier time finding how to do something in Linux than Windows. How good is Apple documentation?
A non-sysintenrals thing... but.... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not from sysinternals, but for tiny little utils, Spacemonger - the older version - not the new "installable" one - is absolutely fantastic for finding out where disk-space went..... can't live without it in any windows shop.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck MS's PSS would routinely have you use his tools even before the purchase because nothing they put out internally was nearly as useful.
Around the time MS hired Russinovich a lot of people on Slashdot were worried that it would mean the death of Sysinternals's tools, but what you say is why that argument was almost ridiculous: there'd have been open revolt within MS if that went down.
(I suppose they could have kept the tools internal to MS, but that didn't seem likely.)
Re:Duh (Score:3, Interesting)
They're not. This whole article is a marketing puff piece.
You'll see similar articles all over the web, like "Win 7 cheat code" etc. Windows 7 adoption is slowing, as its honeymoon period ends and the computer buying public realise, despite the intense hype, it's just not a very interesting product. That's why they're touting the phony 10% adoption figure now and not showing any true growth curve.
Re:For speedy access (Score:1, Interesting)
Save the text below as updatetools.cmd and run it as a scheduled task once a month.
set to_dir=%~dp0 /Y /D /C *.* %to_dir%
pushd \\live.sysinternals.com\tools
xcopy
popd
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)