Hi Folks,
Seasons compliments to all.
This is about how NOT to have fun with your box. during the holiday
period ...
1st I needed to use my seldom used win98 for a windows only app. Win
crashed big. I rebooted using a win boot disk (it worked - surprise) and
tried to start windows. No go so run scandisk, but its not on the
floppy. I reboot linux, mount the qemu version of win and transfer
needed files to the floppy.
Rebooted the floppy and checked the drive. Crosslinked files galore so
gave the checking away as a lost cause and reformatted. Checked the
drive several times and each time got a different drive id. Also tried
dosfsck without success. Is the drive about to crash???
I have another 40g drive from the box I got from Craig so set that up as
a new primary drive, and repartitioned it and set up 3 vfat ptns to
duplicate the original one , then installed win98.
Next I changed the new drive to secondary & booted linux. Using
diskdrake I partitioned the rest of the drive to mirror the old one.
/home was also backed up to /D drive, the only one with enough space.
Data on all ptns bar the faulty one was then transferred to the new
drive using either cp or dd. The old drive was then disabled and the new
one became hda. Reboot, and... you guessed it, linux failed on both
bootable ptns, and win 98 had disappeared!
Out came the knoppix disk for a look at the state of things, all
appeared ok so I then did a minimum reinstall without reformatting of
the mandrake10 ptn. All went well including updating lilo and my
fallback install was up and running fully.
I then tried to get the mandriva ptn bootable using the same procedure,
but more disaster - apps which I did not over-write were disabled. Arrr
well reinstall them using rpm -i --force but that caused duplicate files
to be installed but with a xxxrpm suffix.
I now had many surplus files in /etc so I set a filter , selected 'all'
and pressed 'del'. They all disappeared along with every /etc
subdirectory ---- Ohhh [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Out came the mandriva boot cd again, The ptn was reformatted and
mandriva installed. The good side of the whole thing was that I had not
lost any data, even the emails were still there, but I could not get at
them after reinstalling netscape, it insisted on starting from scratch.
I could see them all in the file structure, but it took me over a day of
moving directories around to finally get access to them all. Who was it
who decided that dir names in upper case should be altered to lower
case? Grrrrrr.
Windows has also been reinstalled now. I still have some setup problems
to sort out, and apps to install as needed, but 10 days or so later I'm
up and running again.
Barry
Nick Rout wrote:
How did everyone go away from their desktops and favourite OS? Did everyone get frustrated by the in-law's windows box?
Anyone have any linux related gems to share?
