[Chester LUG] Can anyone help

[Roger Gibson]

I brought my young friend Patrick to Thursday's meet in Chester.  He is 
a total Linux novice, but is showing interest and looks to be getting 
stuck in.  He has a laptop with Windows mounted and tried first a Mepis 
live CD I got from a recent Linux Format.

So that he could work with good documentation for his first 
installation, I gave him a Susi 9.1 distro, complete with a couple of 
thick tomes.  He has got this running OK since Thursday, but is now in 
trouble, and I'm not suffiently adept myself to help him over the phone.

I don't think he defragmented his disc before loading Susi, so may have 
lost some windows stuff (not sure how clever the Susi partitioner is).  
Anyway, to shorten a long story, he used his Mepis live CD to 
repartition for a second time to give himself more windows disc space, 
and is now having trouble with the bootloader, and cannot run anything, 
except the Mepis live distro.  He is backed up, but I'm not sure if he 
has all the necessary to reload Windows, or how illegit it is.

If anyone thinks they can help, please 'e'mail me and I'll put you in 
touch with Patrick.  I'd like to get a school lad keen on Linux, and I 
think he might well get some of his mates interested if he can get going 
well.

Many thanks - Roger.