My computer's senility is getting worse :(

[Pizzasgood]

Actually, by backup I meant copying 280 some megabytes of compressed files to a cd (plus 140 I had from a previous backup). The only stuff I'll lose if I totall screw up is about two gigabytes of music (they're wavs at the moment, that's why they're so big) and a hundred megabytes of wallpapers, most of which I won't ever use anyways. I might have to mess with the big drive (which is where everything good is anyways) in the end if it turns out that the old drive is at fault, so that's why I used a cd.

Yeah, I know the advantages of dvds. I'm just not spending $60 on a drive I'll use for 6 months or less when I can just use cds for now. My laptop will hopefully come with one. If not, I'll get one eventually.

[Pizzasgood]

Whew! I got lucky. Turns out it was just a corrupted master boot record. Popped in the Western Digital Data Lifeguard cd that came with my newer harddrive, booted, fiddled around, found an "update mbr" button, clicked, and POOF! All better. Except my Lilo is gone, but I can get that back later. I don't use Vector anymore anyways. Other than running Apache with chroot from Puppy and logging in once to play with Lilo, I haven't used it in months.

I don't know how it got messed up, though, because it's been a month since I messed with Lilo.

And, I got a good benifit out of all this: I finally got around to backing up some stuff! I also learned that that disk is bootable. I don't think I knew that until today. Doesn't understand linux partitions, though. Now, what's next on my list? Hmm.... Maybe I'll start on PersonalPan Puppy tomorrow....

Oh, and I'm going to pretend to be Dad sometime when I have nothing better to do.

[aahhaaa]

I updated mine and here is the layout
WindowXP 4.25G | linux swap 1G | linux ext3 10G | vfat32 remainder of drive
no extended partitions

WindowsXP is backed up using growisofs:

Code: Select all

growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/dev/hda 

(15minutes on my machine)
restored using: in puppy of course.

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/dvd of=/dev/hda

(25mins)

Which is faster than scubbing the weekly new virus, removing bloat, reinstall, etc.

Windows swap I moved to D:drive (vfat32)

Sadly I tried to boot using the DVDimage of windows but it doesn't work. someday I'll try booting with QEMU

I see they are making a unionfs version for windows, so there is hope someday in the next decade that windows could multisession.

With one DVD-R you could backup/restore the entire slow harddrive, with two DVD-R's you can backup windows, wipe clean HD, install Puppy to HD, backup puppy to second DVD, restore Windows from first DVD whenever your Bro. wants to play. or restore puppy from second DVD. using two DVD-RW you can even save changes (same commands as above )

Ted- this'd make a nice tutorial