[Herefordshire] Things not to do.

[David Reid]

Things not to do 1)

Fiddle with your linux installation while watching 'Comic Relief Fame 
Academy', after a long hard demoralising day at work.

Things not to do 2)

Use partition magic to drop yout linux partitions (it wouldn't boot 
after some long forgotten attempt to give XP a bit more elbow room on my 
laptop and anyway I fancied trying a different distribution). Grub gets 
a bit shirty because it's configuration file lives on the linux boot 
partition. On a dual boot XP/Linux machine you lose the ability to boot 
your XP install as well.

Things not to do 3)

Forget the XP Administrator password. To reinstall the windows boot 
loader you need to boot off the XP CD, choose the recover option then 
type fixmbr. Before it does that it asks you for the Administrator 
password. I didn't even know it had a password on my PC!


Thankfully, Grub still allows you to boot an OS even if you lose it's 
config file :-

grub>  rootnoverify (hd0,1)            # the 1 is because Dell create a 
hidden recovery partition
grub> makeactive
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

got me back into XP and although my Dell's odd installation stopped me 
restoring the windows boot loader a quick Ubuntu install put everything 
back in working order. God bless the internet.

And surely Reggie should have gone before Dawn? Go Edith.

'Fame Academy' has just started again - think I'll have a quick fiddle 
with my new Ubuntu install :-)

David.