[supaapple]

I've heard something called "freezing" your hard drive. What I want to do is run a program that will stop all new data from being written on my hard drive so that every time I restart my computer anything I wrote to whatever partition I "freeze", it will be erased. I've already tried google but I've been through about 10 pages of something completely different. If anyone else has heard of or knows how to do it their help will be greatly appreciated.

[GWatt]

it's called deep freeze
http://www.faronics..../deepfreeze.asp

[supaapple]

Thank you so much. I hope this helps me.

[baavgai]

Interesting. I hadn't known about that one. I've used UnionFS to do basically the same thing. LiveCD make use of this, Slax being the first. Essentially, you overlay mounts at the same point. Only one of them stores changes. If you want, you can just delete the section that stores the changes on next boot. LiveCDs usually use ramdisk.

[GWatt]

My old high school uses deep freeze. They have one or two dedicated IT guys for more than 1,000 students, so they don't really have another option.

Thankfully they also have a dedicated fileserver so that students can store stuff permanently.

My high school actually had a very good IT dept.

[baavgai]

GWatt, on 17 Oct, 2008 - 07:50 PM, said:

My old high school uses deep freeze.

The way they're using the product sounds like the way many companies "flash images", with things like Acronis, Ghost, etc. You just have a central server with backups of preinstalled boxes. When it's time for the big reset, the machine boots up on a custom CD or even a small bootstrap on the HD and boom, clean box. The more advanced / expensive solutions will even load in unique data, like computer name, IP address, etc.

You can set Windows boxes to have user desktop, personal space, settings, on the domain. Large companies have few IT guys that do this work for many thousand nodes. Such shops will have spare units at remote sites. A user calls, they're told to pull a new unit out of the closet and ship the problem one to IT. They plug the new computer in, authenticate themselves, and carry on as if nothing happened.

[GWatt]

No, Deep Freeze, or at least how my HS used it, is a per machine piece of software. I remember that when software had to be installed the IT guys would log into each computer and update them individually.
It might be possible to use DF in conjunction with Ghost, but they didn't use it that way.

[edit]
as i understand things like Ghost, they actively change the contents of the HD. I think DF is closer to UnionFS.

This post has been edited by GWatt: 17 October 2008 - 05:59 PM

[no2pencil]

supaapple, on 17 Oct, 2008 - 06:02 PM, said:

I've heard something called "freezing" your hard drive.

I heard it called "locking" & it's something that is very important when adding a hard drive to the original Xbox.

[MorphiusFaydal]

GWatt, on 17 Oct, 2008 - 06:50 PM, said:

My old high school uses deep freeze. They have one or two dedicated IT guys for more than 1,000 students, so they don't really have another option.

Thankfully they also have a dedicated fileserver so that students can store stuff permanently.

My high school actually had a very good IT dept.

AFAIK, my old HS still uses DeepFreeze. But our IT guys (IMHO) sucked.

And I'm fairly certain that there's a way to get DeepFreeze to unlock over the network.... 2.4k+ students, and they damn well didn't go around to each system on their own... And I can specifically remember applications updating over the network.... Although that was 5 years, so I may not be remembering right.

[GWatt]

If you ever log onto a DF protected computer you'll notice there's an internal hard drive in addition to the C:. In our computers it was labeled T: (Thawspace) I'm assuming that's where all of the actual files are stored. I don't know because I had no permissions on that drive whatsoever. I also know it wasn't a second physical drive because linux livecds only detected the one internal drive.

To make changes to a DF protected computer all you need to do is have an account with write permissions on the T: drive.