Shady Goings On

After more investigation last night it seems the root of the problem my be a hardware issue rather than anything to do with Windows, I also had some issues with Linux.

I left the box powered off at the mains over night and this morning I was able to boot both Linux and Windows. It seems to be a heat issue, perhaps caused by the processor-intensive DVD conversion I mentioned earlier. It may also be some BIOS quirk or ACPI (power management) problem.

Hopefully no permanent damage has occurred, time will tell.

Well it’s unbelievable: I only just got Linux working and Windows stops! It’s almost like it’s gone on strike or something…

I left a dvd encoding over-night (it takes a while…) and the pc wasn’t responding in the morning. A quick reboot reveals that Windows no longer boots. Normally it would at least give an error or something but not a thing, just a mashed-up display (the colour logo progress screen), and it’s the same story in the alleged Safe-mode.

I know that it has nothing to do with the Linux installation because I simply can’t plug the two hard-drives in at once (I only have 1 ide channel so that’s two discs: a main one and my cd/dvd drive). Actually it’s come to the rescue, I’ve unplugged my cd drive so I can both my Linux and Windows drives in at the same time. I’ve then booted Linux and copied all my important stuff off the Windows disc.

There were a few problems to overcome:

The first is that there isn’t any NTFS support in FC6 but using yum (yum install ntfs-3g) I was able to install it.
Next was that the disks hadn’t been closed down properly (Windows crashed) and so I had to ‘repair’ the disk (to some extent anyway). This was done with ntfsfix /dev/hda1. ntfsfix is part of the ntfsprogs package (yum install ntfsprog.i386)

After all that I mounted the Windows disk as read-only and backed my data up.

I’ve finally got my CD/DVD burner working (thanks to the Nero InfoTool) and so I was able to burn a DVD I downloaded last week: The Fedora Core 6 install DVD.

Many people reading this won’t know what Fedora Core is: it’s an operation system that can be used on a desktop pc (or laptop etc) as an alternative to Windows. It’s not an add-on or extra bit of software, it totally replaces Windows.
Actually I’ve installed it along side Windows 2000 so that until I completely understand how to use Fedora I still have Windows to fall back on (it’s called dual-booting). Anyway, once I undestand it I have to show Alison

So why am I chaning from Windows 2000? Well actually I really like Windows 2000, I know where to find all the settings, all my favourite applications run on it and it’s great for gaming, however, Microsoft are now pushing Vista and so they won’t support 2000 for much longer. Windows Vista and XP don’t interest me, they seem to be more about cheap animated menus than providing real functionallity. All this animation, graphics etc costs processing power that I think should be put to a better use. My PC has 256Mb of RAM, ample for my needs however Vista requires 1Gb (that’s 4x more) as a mininum and that’s before you start doing anything!

I leave you with a screenshot of my new desktop showing Google:

This course is the fifth in the Certificate in Web Applications Development. The Open Source movement has had a significant and lasting impact on the way that software can be engineered, distributed and used. This course introduces the origins and aims of the Open Source movement, and its principles of software development and distribution. The course also examines the ‘distributed team’ nature of open source development and how versioning tools, such as CVS, can be used to help manage source. The course highlights the characteristics of Open Source components for use in web applications, and provides an appreciation of the range of tools available with some experience of applying one such scripting tool (PHP) to application development. There will be an online conference where you can ask for help and advice.

Due to start in May 2007, wish me luck!