Install to the disposable machine and record what each route keeps

short · 60 min · Objective 1.1

Task

Perform a clean installation on the disposable guest, then establish -- by experiment rather than by reading -- what an upgrade-style installation keeps and what it discards. The examinable content is the consequences, and the only way to be sure of them is to create a marker and see whether it survives.

Steps

  1. Snapshot the guest, then perform a clean installation. Record the route taken and the time it took in lab/install/clean.txt.
  2. Before the next step, create markers: a file in the user's documents, an installed application, and a changed desktop setting. List them in lab/install/markers.csv with header marker,type,path_or_name.
  3. Snapshot again, then run setup from media choosing to keep files and applications. Record which markers survived in lab/install/kept.csv with header marker,survived,expected.
  4. Revert to the snapshot and repeat with the keep-nothing option. Add the results to lab/install/kept.csv as further rows, using a route column value that distinguishes them.
  5. Write lab/install/accounts.md recording which account type you created, and what a local account and a cloud account each imply for password recovery and for where an encryption recovery key would be stored.

Verify

grep -c . lab/install/clean.txt
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=3 {n++} END {print n" marker(s) defined"}' lab/install/markers.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=3 {n++} END {print n" result(s) recorded"}' lab/install/kept.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 {print $2}' lab/install/kept.csv | sort -u | wc -l
grep -Eic 'recovery key|local account|cloud|microsoft account' lab/install/accounts.md

Three or more markers, results for both routes, and at least two distinct survival answers -- if every marker survived both routes, one of the two runs did not do what you think it did.

Notes

Take the snapshot before each run rather than after. The value of this lab is in repeating it cheaply, and a guest you have to rebuild by hand is a guest you will only test once.

This is an independent study companion for CompTIA A+ Core 2 220-1202 and is not produced by or endorsed by CompTIA.