The Big Reformat - Ubuntu and Windows 2000

12:45.42 - Saturday 3rd February 2007   (Link to This Entry)

Part one of.. who knows how many. I actually started this last night when I got home with the backup portion of the whole farce. Farce? Yeah well nothing's really gone as smoothly as it did during testing, and there's really no reason for it all. Granted, I've moved from a regular IDE Harddrive to the SATA ones in my machine, but is that really enough to throw things out?

Ubuntu installed without problem, detecting the SATA drive and allowing me to partition it as saw fit. I created two equal partitions of 58,000MB which left something like 1.2GB for Linux Swap. Formatted and installed Ubuntu, no problem. Yet.

Downloaded and installed the nVidia Linux drivers using Alberto Milone's ''Envy'' script, which all went OK, but the desktop just wouldn't default to 1600x1200 (only one monitor at the moment). I could select it in the nVidia utils and apply it, but it wouldn't stick.

Installed Windows 2000 on its partition, only for the install to balk at adding some drivers from the motherboard CD and trash the whole thing. I sighed, reformatted and reinstalled the partition and away we went again. Second time lucky, but it took hours to download and install all the frickin' patches, highlighting a major, major difference between Windows and Linux updates: Ubuntu downloaded all updates in one go and installed the lot with no hassle; Windows downloaded and installed, rebooted, downloaded updates for the updates, rebooted again and... you get the picture.

Then the Ubuntu network died. Seriously, what the hell? It had been working flawlessly right up until the point where it decided not to, with no warnings, errors or anything. I reinstalled the whole OS hoping it would fix both this and the desktop resolution problem but to no avail, and I eventually went to bed at 2AM.

So this morning I hunt around the network config file and, on a hunch, delete the entry for my second ethernet adapter. I don't have a Gigabit switch anyway so it's kinda pointless. This brings the network back up instantly - Huzzah! I type 'ubuntu resolution problem' into Google and find a forum entry about configuring X from the terminal, run through the steps and - praise be! - my desktop is now in the correct resolution. I still have no idea why this should cease working just because I used SATA, however.

For a data drive I dug out a Win98 install CD and formatted the whole drive to FAT32. This part went suprisingly smoothly, althoug it was a pain waiting the best part of an hour for it to format. I went and had a shower... and read a book... and went out to post a letter as well. Zzz... I'm currently at the point where I am reformatting the drive using TrueCrypt to create an encrypted partition. It occurs to me that I probably could have done this in plaece of the FAT32 format but I've wasted enough time.

More posts later in the day, I imagine!