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

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

My laptop came ntfs formatted in the first place. Was what I wanted though as I can resize with PM and I don't think NTFS conversion is quite as good as starting with NTFS in the first place. I should have PM 8 somewhere if you need it and a copy of Acronis True Image if you want to make an image of the finished machine (or before you start). It's the only imager that works in Windows (without DOS) and can save across a network

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say, tonight, I am taking the Debian challenge on my laptop myself!