Installing Operating Systems( Comptia Objective 1.3)

Question 1

What is a very common form of a boot media device.

Answer 1

• USB storage

- USB must be bootable and computer must support booting from a USB.

Question 2

What is another form of boot media that is becoming less and less popular?

Answer 2

• DVD and CD-ROM are still somewhat common but becoming less so with more focus on bootable USB drives.

Question 3

What is PXE(“Pixie”)

Answer 3

• Preboot Execution Environment
• Allows you to perform a remote network installation
• Computer must support booting with PXE.

Question 4

If using MAC OS what is a similar type of technology to PXE( Preboot Execution Environment) ?

Answer 4

• Netboot
• Apple technology to boot MACOS from the network
• Similar in concept to PXE.

Question 5

If you have many different types of operating systems that you would like to install what could you use instead of USB and CD/DVD-ROM?

Answer 5

• External SSD/ Hard Drive( External / hot swappable)
• Allows you to store many OS installation files.
• Some external drives can mount an ISO image(DVD-ROM image) Can plug drive straight into a USB interface slot and computer will see it as a DVD-Rom drive/image

Question 6

What is a way to install an operating system from an Internal Hard Drive?

Answer 6

• You could install and boot from a separate drive

- Or you could create and boot from a newly created partition on the same active drive.

Question 7

When installing Windows how could you avoid installation interruptions?

Answer 7

• This is known as Unattended installation
• You can answer Windows questions via the way of a file called “ unattend.xml” this avoids installation interruptions by automatically inputting the answers to each installation question without user intervention.
• Very useful in a large working environment.

Question 8

What does a clean install of an operating system consist of?

Answer 8

• Wipe the slate clean and reinstall without keeping files, apps and data.
• Deletes everything that existed on the storage device prior.
• You would then need to copy your files back from a backup.
• Migration tool can help.

Question 9

What can be used if you wish to install an OS simultaneously on many different systems at the same time?

Answer 9

• Image

- Deploy a clone of an image on every computer.

Question 10

If you’re having a problem with your Windows configuration and you wish to reinstall windows but want to keep your files you can do what?

Answer 10

• Perform a Repair Installation
• Fix problems with Windows OS
• Does not modify user files.

Question 11

What allows a user to run two or more operating systems from a single computer on the same drive?

Answer 11

• Multiboot

Question 12

What is a Recovery Partition?

Answer 12

• Hidden partition with installation files
• Will take a copy of all the Windows Installation files and put them into the hidden partition in the event that you need to perform a repair installation of windows.

Question 13

What feature inside of Windows 8/10 can be used fix issues with a Windows OS installation?

Answer 13

• Refresh/Restore

- Requires that you have a recovery partition on your computer.

Question 14

What is a disk partition?

Answer 14

• Separates the physical drive into logical pieces
• Useful to keep data separated
• Multiple partitions are not always necessary.
• Useful for maintaining separate operating systems such as Windows, Linux etc.

Question 15

What is another name for a storage partition?

Answer 15

• Volume
• Formatted partitions are called volumes
• Microsoft nomenclature.

Question 16

What is an old partition style used on older systems?

Answer 16

• MBR( Master Boot Record)

- Old version of partitioning drives with all of the old limitations.

Question 17

MBR was separated into two different types of partitions which are?

Answer 17

• Primary used for bootable partitions provides a max of 4 primary partitions per hard disk. One of the primary partitions can be marked as active so that your system would know which OS to boot.
• Other type of partition is known as Extended which is used for extending the maximum number of partitions. You can have 1 extended partition per disk( optional. Contains additional logical partitions. Logical partitions inside an extended partitions are not bootable.

Question 18

What format of partition style is used on most modern day systems?

Answer 18

• GPT Partition Style( GUID Partition Table)
• Globally Unique Identifier
• The latest partition format standard.
• Requires a UEFI BIOS which can have up to 128 partitions. No need for extended partitions or logical drives as all partitions are bootable.

Question 19

What is the first step when preparing disks especially when it comes to installing an OS?

Answer 19

• Disk Partitioning
• The first step when preparing disks, some may have already been partitioned. However existing partitions may not always be compatible with your new operating systems.

Question 20

Why must you be very careful when creating disk partitions?

Answer 20

• Because there is serious potential for data loss
• This is not an everyday occurrence.
• Make sure you always check your work before making any changes to the partitions.

Question 21

Before adding a file system to a partition windows wants to know which of the 2 different types of of storage disk that you would like to use which are they?

Answer 21

These are layered on top of the partition and file system( Windows thing)

• Basic disk storage which was available in DOS and windows versions provides primary/extended partitions, and logical drives. Basic disk partitions can’t span separate physical disks.
• Dynamic disk storage which available in all modern Windows versions. Able to span partitions across multiple drives to create a large volume. Able to split data across multiple physical disks( striping). Can also duplicate data across multiple disks(mirroring) these are also forms of RAID and only available with dynamic disk storage. Not all versions of Windows support Dynamic disk storage however.

Question 22

After creating a partition and then selecting which type of storage disk type you wish to use what do you then have to decide on?

Answer 22

• Type of File System to be used. Before data can be written to the partition it must first be formatted.
• OS expect data to be written in a particular format such as FAT32, NTFS, EXFAT etc. NTFS is the most popular.
• Multiple OS’s can read and write to multiple types of file systems. Windows can read FAT, FAT32, NTFS and ExFAT.

Question 23

What is FAT?

Answer 23

• File Allocation Table. One of the first PC-based file systems( circa 1980)
• FAT32 - File Allocation Table provided larger( 2 terabyte) volume sizes with a max file size of 4GBS.
• exFAT - Extended File Allocation Table allowed files to be larger than 4GBs, is considered to be a Microsoft flash drive file system.

Question 24

What is the NTFS and CDFS?

Answer 24

• NT File System
• Extensive Improvements over FAT32. Provides quotas, file compression, encryption, symbolic links, large file support, security and recoverability
• CDFS - Compact Disk File System( ISO 9660 standard). All Operating systems can read the CD

Question 25

What are some other file systems which are used in Linux OS?

Answer 25

• Ext3 Third extended file system is commonly used by the Linux OS
• Ext4 Fourth extended file system which was an update to ext3 also commonly seen in Linux and Android OS.

Question 26

Which file system allows you to access file across the network as if they were local?

Answer 26

• NFS( Network File System) allows you access files across the network as if they were local.
• NFS clients available across many operating systems.

Question 27

If you are using the MAC OS what are some file system types that could be used?

Answer 27

• HFS+ / HFS Plus
• Hierarchical File System also called MAC OS Extended File System
• Replaced Apple File System( APFS) in macOS High Sierra( 10.13)

Question 28

On many operating systems it’s common to have a Swap Partition. What is it and what does it do?

Answer 28

• Used for memory management. Frees memory by moving unused pages onto disk
• Copies back to RAM when needed usually comes in the form of a fast drive such as an SSD.

Question 29

After you have created a partition on a drive, and then chosen the disk storage type and file system type what then do you need to do and decide?

Answer 29

• Perform a format. What type of formatting you will use? Will it be a Quick Format or a Full Format?
• Quick format creates a new file table. Looks like data is erased, but it’s not. Doesn’t provide any additional checks. In Windows 7/8/8.1 and 10 this is the default format.
• In order to perform a full format then you would want to use the “diskpart” command in the command line in Windows. Full format will take quite a bit longer to perform the format. Goes through the entire drive and write 0s to every single sector of the drive. It checks for bad sectors unlike quick formatting. Data will be unrecoverable.
• Benefits of quick formatting is it’s less time consuming as full formatting takes quite some time.

Question 30

What are some other considerations to make during the installation of an operating system?

Answer 30

• You may want to make sure to load alternate third party drivers when necessary such as disk controller drivers etc.
• With a Windows install you may also want to decide on having a Workgroup or a Domain setup( Home vs Business)
• Time/date/region/language settings( Where are you?)
• Driver installation, software and windows updates are a priority immediately after OS installation( Load video drivers, install apps and update OS to have latest security patches etc) . If drivers aren’t automatically found by OS upon booting up you may need to manually find them online from the vendor and load them into the OS.
• May also wish to create a factory recovery partition if the OS doesn’t do this automatically that creates a copy of all the installation files in the case that you need to repair the OS and reinstall.,