Old Li2-Crystals

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It all started out innocently enough. As Windows users all over will know, once in a while, Windows occasionally gets enough un-dealt with crap built up that it starts to slow down the system and things become sluggish. Be it due to accumulated memory leaks or whatever, when it happens the only solution is to shut down and reboot.

Last night, my XP system was in such a state. So I did what I've done ten thousand times before, I closed everything and shut down for a minute. I waited and allowed Windows to shut down at it's own pace as usual. I waited a minute and hit the power button to re-start. That is when I got the first indication that Windoze would no longer even pretend to be my alli in any respect.

The first ominous sign was when that reboot got to the point where it should have shown the XP logo screen, I got a message telling me that windows couldn't start because such-n-such file was corrupted. This has happened before and I did what I've done before, I got out a floppy (yeah, I still keep some around) and copied the file in question from my wife's XP computer and put it in place on mine and rebooted again.

This time it informed me that another file was corrupted and needed to be replaced so I copied that one as well. This kept happening, each time another DLL file from the /Windows/System32 directory needed to be replaced. I decided that there was no point in trying to copy all those files one at a time via a floppy that most of them wouldn't even fit on. Fortunately I had an Ubuntu 8.10 Live-CD that I was planning to try out, so I booted from the CD and used my flash drive to copy everything in the /Windows/System32 directory from the working machine to mine.

Another couple of hours wasted trying to reboot Windoze and get things fixed and I packed it in for the night. This morning I attacked the problem fresh, deciding to back up the most important data to CD and everything else to another partition and then simply re-install Windows. Since My XP install was actually an upgrade from '98, I got out the Win98 install cd and got started. The process seemed to go the same as it has a couple dozen other times I've installed / re-installed it. Until it was done copying files and announced it was time for the first reboot.

This time I was greeted with the message that there wasn't enough memory to initialize Windoze. "Ridiculous!" I decided, and made sure that Autoexec.bat and config.sys were stripped down to bare minimum and tried again only to get the same thing. I ended up trying the Windows install a second time and got the same results. I booted from an emergency disk I kept around for just such occasions and started checking out everything I could. That's when I found out that Windoze had stabbed me in the back.

My partition table had been re-written

Something over 200++ gigabytes of files across three other partitions (drives "F","G" and "K") were irretrievably gone.

If Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer had walked in just then I'd have beaten them to death with my monitor.

It was shortly after that final last straw that I made *THE* decision. Prompted by mention that one of my nieces had been running Mandriva on a dual boot for quite a while and just didn't boot windows anymore, I determined that it was time for me to declare my independence of Micro$oft and live without Windoze. I got out the Ubuntu 8.1 install Cd and used it.

There's a lot I have to learn, find out non-windows ways to do things, but I think I'm up for the task. I had been planning to do something like this on a laptop and document my progress in blog posts and videos. Looks like I'm going to get a head start on that project doesn't it? Oh, I'm still going to do something like that, documenting the migration from Windows to Linux, using a laptop, some videos and a whole bunch of blog entries. In the meantime, I'll probably be documenting some of the migration I find myself suddenly in the beginning of.

I might run Windows again ... in a virtual machine that's thoroughly sand-boxed to keep my data and HD safe from it.

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