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Date:	Sun, 24 Aug 2003 12:09:14 PDT7
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: setting up eCS 1.1

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butch@fyrelizard.com wrote:
>
> how is the maintenance partition used? Sheridan
> said he has a small one of only 40 MB of HPFS type.
> What kind of activity or information is placed in the
> maintenance partition? Very basic question!

My Maintenance partition is a bit different from most others. Mine is
set up so that, if my main Production partition gets scrambled and needs
a few hours of research & repair, I can boot to my Maintenance partition
and finish all my work (deadlines don't care if you've scrambled your
system) and then later repair my main Production partition.

Thus, my Maintenance partition is a full OS/2 install with all necessary
Fixpaks, drivers, paths, etc. I keep it updated so everything is at the
same level as my Production partition (i.e. when I install the latest
DANI driver I update _both_ partitions). I did set my Maintenance
CONFIG.SYS so it doesn't do AUTOCHECK; that way I don't have to wait for
any long HPFS checks on partitions that I don't need right away.

It turns out this works pretty good. My main Production partition has
suffered from an occasional scrambled desktop and plenty of scrambled
OS2.INI files, and I can just boot to my Maintenance partition and meet
my deadlines, then repair the Production partition later.

Note that I installed my Maintenance partition _first_. It is drive F:
and my main Production partition is drive G:. This was done as a safety
precaution -- I wanted to install any operating system changes (such as
Fixpaks or new driver versions) to the Maintenance partition first so
that if there was some kind of incompatibility I could still use my
Production partition. My data and user apps are all on H: where they
are available from either F: or G:.

By the way, when my Production partition does get scrambled and I know
what repair needs to be made, I can quickly boot to the Maintenance
partition and replace the scrambled files from my daily backups (I back
up to partitions M: and N: on a separate hard drive). Usually I just
have to restore the OS2*.INI files and my Production partition is again
bootable and usable. Having a separate Maintenance partition plus the
always-online hard drive backups lets me make these repairs extremely
fast, typically one minute plus the two reboots.

I also boot to the Maintenance partition if I get a system freeze. Then
I can check to make sure booting to the Production partition (which
typically has a couple dozen programs which will automatically restart)
won't cause any problems. (For example, I usually stop my email and
browser apps from restarting before rebooting to the Production
partition.)

Disk space is cheap; a gigabyte is only a couple of dollars and a full
installation on a separate Maintenance partition is well worth it.

Hope this helps,

- Peter

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