[Glastonbury] The bad news... and the good news

[Martin WHEELER]

Well, the bad news is that, like Sean's machine, my Toshiba laptop went
the way of all machines that run XP, and left me struggling with a
variation on the Blue Screen of Death.

The good news is that it wasn't a virus; (it was just XP doing its
normal thing!!!); and by judicious use of the Toshiba recovery disks, I
was able to recover *all* the 15G of Linux stuff put in jeopardy by the
breakdown.  (And XP?  Well, I just stomped on it.  Then replaced it.)

Briefly, what happened was that XP decided to scribble all over itself,
and also attempted to scribble all over the far end of the disk.  (I
last had this with a copy of Win95 that ran off the end of its partition
buffers, and deleted everything else in its way.)  This is actually my
fault; as I bought the laptop with XP already installed, and
re-partitioned the disk and installed Linux, _without_ totally
re-installing XP as well, as I should have done.  (If you don't, XP
continues to think that the whole disk belongs to it, and
eventually, at some point, will merrily scribble over everything in
sight.)

Thankfully, Toshiba have provided some really good recovery CDs (pity
there's no documentation to go with them -- you have to use the
utilities blind -- press the button, and hope for the best!)  Having
copied 15Gb of data to another machine, which I had to set up for the
purpose, I eventually found that the Toshiba utilities are *excellent*
at sussing disks with non-Microsoft stuff on them -- something that the
Microsoft utilities supplied simply _won't_ do.  (DON'T use the
Microsoft-supplied FDISK, for example.  It tells monster porkies.)

So -- if anyone else ever gets in this situation with this kit -- use
the custom option for re-installing XP without fear -- it *will*
recognise your Linux partitions; and it *will* ensure that the new
version of XP is contained within whatever partition(s) you give it.
There is no need to lose all your Linux stuff, just because XP decides
to misbehave.

And if you set a brand-new machine with XP already on it to dual-boot --
make sure you RE-INSTALL XP completely as part of the process.

HTH,
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler@startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
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