whew

We're on the road to recovery with the XP box. After much Googling, I concluded that there was really no way around running the Windows repair utility.

Not wanting to risk my data, I decided to back up the hard drive first. I've had this nagging feeling for over a year that I needed to start backing up my files to an external hard drive. Too late. I needed a drive and I needed it now. So, I grabbed a 250G My Book from Office Depot. With their $50 rebate, not a bad buy. I hate mail-in rebates, but $50 is enough motivation to get me off my can and get it sent in.

ok, so I had the drive now and needed to copy to it. I decided that I was going to boot in Linux and copy the hard drive to the new USB drive. I had read some articles on Lifehacker about this, and a quick search turned up an article on booting Knoppix from a flash drive. The geek factor was irresistible and I had to try it. I went through the tutorial and failed when I got to the Makeboot step. Crap. I downloaded .NET as instructed--no luck. I really wanted to make this one work, especially since the other versions of running from a flash drive basically involved having a linux installation running when you build your flash drive installation. Since the USB port on my linux box is trashed, I really wanted to load this thing from Windows.

I wandered around the pendrivelinux site some more and turned up their old instructions. Based on the old instructions, instead of running "makedrive.exe," I ran "syslinux.exe -f e:" I don't know what the -f option does, but I tried it without a switch, something went wrong, and then I tried it with -f and it worked. Accidental voodoo. Anyways, I now had a bootable USB drive.

So, I booted up in knoppix. In all honesty, since I knew that I was booting an OS designed to boot from CD, I was expecting something pretty small and unremarkable. I was BLOWN AWAY at how much stuff was on this thing!!! It is quite impressive. I guess, when I think about it, my first Linux install was done with a pile of 40 1.44MB floppies, so I really shouldn't be so amazed at how much stuff is on this 700MB build, and yet, I am. VERY IMPRESSIVE.

I think I'm going to leave it loaded on my flash drive. It's just too dang cool.

But I digress. In fact, when I booted up on the machine I was trying to recover, that's what I did--digressed. I was so impressed with Knoppix and how many features had booted up from my USB drive that I spent at least 30 minutes just wandering around and saying "cool, wow," etc. and playing around.

When I finally remembered that I was supposed to be about the serious business of recovering my XP installation, I plugged in the My Book and voila! Knoppix auto-detected the drive and mounted it. I created a folder for my backup. Then, I dragged the old hard drive to the new USB drive, and it started grinding away. Beautiful. There was absolutely no setup involved.

Of course, over the USB connection, it wasn't exactly instantaneous, but not too bad.

Once I had the data copied, I rebooted to the windows boot disk and began the arduous process of fixing the install. It took quite a while, but now we are back up and running XP again.

Now, I just have to wade through the Service Pack 2 install and all of the other patches to XP.

Although there is a serious temptation to just blow away the OS and install Linux permanently.....must resist. It is a relief to know that I can just throw in my USB drive and boot to Linux any time I want. :)

--Og