Linux on my laptop - The Saga Continues, Part 3 Had a bit of a scare today. I decided, one more time, to go for a full-on Linux install on my laptop, dual-boot with Win2000. Got myself a couple of iso's with Mandrake 9.1 distro, and a copy of Partition Magic 8 and started playing fast and loose with my hard drive. First I ran a scandisk (or checkdisk in Win2k), then a defrag to get all those little files arranged nicely and then i ripped my win2000 install a new one; a nice sizable 5gig chunk of empty space. Not that much, you say? On a 20gig drive, with windows crap taking up 11gigs, believe me - it is a big chunk. Satisfied with the job PMagic did i watched the laptop reboot, and I decided to run another checkdisk, just to be extra sure. you know...to get that warm fuzzy feeling of comfort, knowing everything is alright with the world, or at least with my laptop. A few clicks later, I'm staring at the Windows 2000 Logo when ..... poof! the dreaded BSOD!!!!! WTF?!?! Inaccessible boot device? I'll show you inaccessible! Boot on this, mofo! I'm ready to scream. little veins on my forehead are starting to pop, cold sweat is falling down my a-crack. How can this be? A perfect repartitioning, a perfect reboot. What gives? I run down the hall in our office, dodging my fellow employees, to the room where we store the MSDN goodness. I dig up the Win2000 cdrom, retrace my steps and stuff it into the cdrom drive. I reboot, let it boot into the setup...so far so good.....yes, please setup win2000, yes please repair the existing installation, yes please replace all of those files with funny names. 20 to 30 minutes later, after windows recognized all of its hardware, I'm back at the desktop. My precious precious windows 2000 professional desktop, with my wardriving wallpaper (The node is out there). As a last insult, it actually finally performed that last chedkdisk i asked it to do like an hour ago! but that's OK, i say. I'm back in business. next phase of the project is to actually install the Mandrake distro and get into some heavy- (or light-) duty WiFi hacking. What's ahead of me? Network drivers....wireless drivers.....I'm ready. I'm prepared. I ain't afraid no more, ma. Bring it on.

I'll keep you posted...  ¶ 9:54 PM