The benefits of bootable ZIP are much as Robert said. You can put all of Win95 and then some on one disk, and boot from it. Then you can use the supplied copy-disk utility to "clone" the boot disk to another. This gives you a bootable backup, in case a virus corrupts your primary boot disk. Viri, once activated, are usually quite efficient at spreading to all disks in the PC, so if you suspect you have one, you must currently boot from a clean floppy and immediately run uninfected anti-virus software from the DOS prompt. Having Win95 and AV software on one ZIP provides a very convenient way to recover from infection, since you don't need to work with the DOS prompt. Just be sure not to open or run any file on any hard disk until after running the AV software, or the virus may spread to the boot ZIP.
With current technology, you can create an emergency Win95 boot floppy which will get you a DOS prompt, but not the GUI (i.e. the real Win 95) because it takes over 50MB.
If you have SCSI insider ZIP, I believe you can boot from it if you have it attached to a "bootable controller" (such as the one IOM sells) as long as it is set to SCSI ID 0 (or so I'm told.)
So what's the big deal, if you can already do it with SCSI? We don't all have SCSI, and if you do it with SCSI, you pretty much have to reconfigure or CMOS disable your SCSI hardware to boot from anything else but your floppy. With the new Phoenix BIOS, my guess is ZIP will appear as another choice in the CMOS setup menu under something like "Boot Drive Preferences", for example allowing you to boot from a floppy if one is in the floppy drive, else ZIP if one is in the ZIP drive, else the C drive.
One aspect I am curious about is whether it would be possible to boot from a write protected ZIP, if all files that required writing during bootup were moved to the hard drive. If so, it would make the ZIP boot disk immune from all viri attacks, at least until someone writes the "unprotect" sequence into their virus.
BTW, from the announcement of the new Phoenix Bios, it also supports booting from a CDROM, or even a network card. Very interesting. These boot methods would be impervious to virus attacks. (CDROM for sure, for a bootable NIC, it would probably depend on how good the network security was.) |
