it's here, it's here!

[ciphergoth]

My laptop arrived!

BTW tip for anyone else curious: it turns out that WinXP ships as a FAT32 filesystem, but reformats to NTFS on first boot. There is no warning and no option to stop the reformat - three fingered salute, pulling the plug and jabbing the power button did nothing. Thus if you want to repartition without buying PartitionMagic, you must boot first from a floppy and run FIPS before Windows has a chance to run.

Dammit.

Update oh, and this machine has no floppy or CDROM drive. The only way I can see to boot Linux is over the net. I can see I have a serious challenge ahead.

Update or by making a bootable CompactFlash card. I think. The laptop has a dedicated CF slot, but I don't know if it can boot from it. Update It can't. It refuses to try and create a bootable CF card. Windows 98 is happy to, but the laptop then refuses to boot from it. Arse; back to the netboot.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

uh, yes please! That could save my life this evening. Thanks, Ian!

There's a reserved bit at the end of the hard drive with everything you need to completely restore the system to factory settings from scratch; you can access it as a boot option.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Can the bios boot from a usb floppy?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I think so, yes. If you have one I could borrow tonight I'd be pathetically grateful!

[figg.livejournal.com]

well, I can *borrow* a floppy usb drive if you need it

(i.e. steal it off a friend (who wont mind))

thomas.figg

at ed.ac.uk

if you need it after netbooting fails to work

[conflux.livejournal.com]

You will need Partition Magic 7 to work with XP. If Ian doesn't have that I can let you have a copy. I also have Boot Magic 7 which you may find useful. Let me know if you would like either of these?