[Peter2150]

Hi Aaron

First with Vm Ware Workstation, you literally are working on a separate computer. It boots up and shuts down just like a real machine. If you add a disk drive, you have to go thru all the steps that you would adding a real disk drive to your computer, with the windows format, and inititalization etc.

The snapshot refered to in VMware VM machines, is like a rollback Rx snapshot on steriods. It literally saves the state of the machine. So you can totally change software, and then revert to the state before by going to that snapshot. Only difference is no reboot. But here's the steriod part, and NO regular rollback software can do this.

You can totally format the disk drives, destroy them, delete stuff completely, and then go to another snapshot, and the system is back like it was.

This is great for testing malware. For example. I take a snapshot, and then run the Killdisk trojan. It wipes out the disk, where recovery would be a bit tedious. I just go back to the snapshot, and like magic the system is back where it was when I took the snapshot.

Pete

PS Another thing I love is say I want to do something with the real system disks and am not sure what I am doing, what prompts might appear and what I can mess up by doing something wrong, I'll first do it in the VM machine, and that way, if I do screw up, absolutely no harm done. This way I can learn what to do, what not to do, etc.