« Cleaning up old memories | Main | Redneck jokes for Java »
April 07, 2004
Near miss migrating to Linux
Whew! Close one. After talking about it in theory, I almost made a wholesale switch to Linux last night, unplanned.
Most major paradigm changes in my computing style have come as a result of catastrophies. Losing a hard drive, accidentally deleting a partition, someone hacking into my machine, etc. As long as I'm in the process of reconstructing my digital life from scratch, I might as well do it the way I want.
While I was cleaning my office and reminiscing yesterday, I had Partition Magic resizing the NTFS partition to make more room for Gentoo Linux. PM was almost done when it died with an error, and Windows XP was hosed. Blue screen of death every time it booted. 21GB worth of my life's work is on that NTFS partition.
After I picked myself up off the floor, I tried to rescue the NTFS partition using Trinux. Trinux is very cool, and I've used it in the past when my HDD crashed and I had to rescue as much as I could off an NTFS partition. But this time, no go.
As I was formulating how I would blow away the NTFS partition and install Linux instead of XP, I made a last-ditch effort to see if Windows could heal itself. Surprisingly, the Repair feature on the install CD worked well enough to let me do a chkdsk /f, and a mere 45 minutes later XP finished cleaning up the mess and I could boot. But the partition still wasn't resized, and I needed more room for Gentoo.
I immediately tried doing the same thing again, with similar results (but I knew how to fix it this time). 90 minutes later, with a re-re-stored NTFS partition, I decided to try the ntfsresize utility that comes with the open-source NTFSprogs package. Not surprisingly, it actually worked.
Another hour to move files around and expand the ReiserFS partition, and I've got a whole 11GB to grow into with Gentoo. Start some "emerges" and it's off to bed.
Posted by pete at April 7, 2004 02:36 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Comments
At no point did it occur to you to make a backup? :-)
Posted by: Stu at April 7, 2004 12:32 PM
Life's too short for such things. Fry's has adequate boxes for $300; use a KVM switch and you're good to go to do as much interesting stuff with Linux. Hmmm... I feel the need to do a backup tonight.
Posted by: Steve Stroh at May 25, 2004 09:14 PM