S: Botched OS installations

[zero2dash]

This is definitely suckage, even though I was already planning on reimaging my computer (so I would've had to deal with this soon enough anyway) - it didn't have to happen last night. Aargh

So my XPpro has been acting up lately. It's done worse lately than it ever has; I've had one Dr. Watson/Explorer unified crash (when I say "unified" I mean because Watson crashes and then drags Explorer with it) every day for the last few days...consequently right after I had started cleaning up things (deleting temp files, scanning av/spyware etc) and hoped I wouldn't have to clean install everything again.

I've had XPpro dual booting with Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog - because, like an idiot I've been screwing around with Linux. (This isn't an attack on Linux, at least that's not what I mean to say - I've tried it before and never had much luck but I didn't put too much effort into learning it. I figured "one more time" so I tried it again this time and started figuring things out; ie how wonderful 'apt-get' is.)

Well I thought yesterday...hey, I'll install a really clean small Win2k so my wife can play games on Pogo still; while I've got that on there for her, I'll reformat my XPpro partition and reinstall everything. Once that's all done, I'll trash the Win2k partition and re-join the free space with the XPpro partition.

So last night I install Win2k. Boots fine, updates fine...even (to my surprise) Win2k apparently DOES support Hyper Threading. At least in my Task Manager, 2 cpu windows were shown (although in Device Manager, Win2k doesn't list cpus so I didn't see 2 cpus shown, and under Windows Information, it only listed 1 cpu). After a while I figure...well I'll just leave everything be and let her keep using the XPpro partition for now, it's not all that bad.

So I try to load up XPpro (using the GRUB loader thats already on there and has been working fine up until this point) and...XPpro won't load. Something about a corrupt System directory. "Use R to repair with the install cd" blah blah. I boot Win2k...it boots fine. I boot into recovery console, fdisk out the Win2k partition, then do fixboot and bootcfg. XPpro still won't boot. I boot into Ubuntu, mess around for a few minutes (looking for an answer) and don't find any. I reboot into recovery console, figure "what the hell" and do a fixmbr (figuring this will screw up Ubuntu since it'll replace GRUB).

Reboot and try to get into XPpro...still no dice.
And now, no way to access Ubuntu.


So after some thinking, I figure, ok, I can either a) take two hours out of my life and clean install/configure XPpro right now, or b) I can install Ubuntu again just for the time being and it installs quick. So I take the quicker route and install Ubuntu. I go through updating it with some of the packages (update Firefox, add Java) and when I try to install kde (kubuntu-desktop), one of the packages fails and won't install. I waste (roughly) 2 hours screwing around with this, and, in the end, didn't get it working like I could've gotten XPpro working in that same 2 hour block of time.

I finally gave up and reinstalled with an old Ghost cd I had and updated XPpro with the recent critical update patches etc. and told my wife "it's temporarily fixed until I do everything from scratch".

I don't really know who to blame in this or if I can blame anyone (Microsoft, Ubuntu, or me). It seems like trying to install 2k after already having Ubuntu installed is what killed it. Initially, it was XPpro only. Then Ubuntu, which installs GRUB and had no problems. I guess after GRUB installs, if you install another OS it messes up GRUB and you run into problems like I had. Unless there's a way to update GRUB or reinstall it or something? I dunno.

I'm just mad.
And I've given up for the last time on Linux. After a lot of thinking, I said to myself "why am I messing with this when Windows works perfectly fine enough and I've never had problems being hacked, virused, etc. So what if I have to download critical updates every so often...at least it works for me.

[mcs328]

buy your wife a laptop

[zero2dash]

Back when we got our tax returns, I was shopping around for laptops (I was going to get a used/refurb one though for cheap, probably like a 1g P3) but we never took the plunge. It was either a laptop or an HDTV, and I bought...neither. Instead our semi-weekly Walmart trips sucked all the money out instead. That and having a baby...that does it too.

[mcs328]

Ah the baby is well worth the sacrifice. I don't look forward to reinstalling the OS on my dell. All of the sudden IE no longer works which is fine when you just use firefox but it makes it impossible for any windows update since I haven't patched from SP2.