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

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

That's an odd one. I've not seen that happen before. I'll check what happens when my my new laptop arrives tomorrow...

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

You're a braver man than I if you tried to turn the power off while it was reformatting...

[xora.livejournal.com]

Mine just had an icon on desktop that said Convert to NTFS. That was a Toshiba Satellite.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

That's what my Tosh did, too.

This new one is going to be HP/Compaq and a different version of XP, so we'll see what happens...

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

Why do they ship WinXP on FAT32? Makes no sense to me.

[babysimon]

Uh, you mean they didn't send the CDROM drive you asked for, right?

[lovingboth]

If you want PM, just ask.

What are you supposed to do if you get XP into a non-bootable state? Not that MS software ever gets like that...

[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!

[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?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Yes, it does.
But, mine isn't connecting to the Net :) beat you!
(although it's not the computer's fault, it's the Ethernet it's doing it through's fault)

[vampwillow]

all of the above (PM is the best program I've ever bought; um versions 1, 4 and 6 that is...)

and if anyone can make a linux boot through CF I'm sure it will be you ;-)

[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

[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!

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Ah, it did it too...

Must be something in the OEM installations now...

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

An easier way to get Linux on would be to transfer the distro to your harddrive, including the loadlin.exe utility.

This allows you to boot a kernel image from dos.

So, boot the lappie, but hit the key to boot to a command prompt, instead of going into windows. Then, just run loadlin with appropriate parameters, and it'll boot the c:\linux\bzimage etc for you.

Umm.. I'm kinda assuming WinXP *has* a Boot-to-command-prompt option.. Does it?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Umm.. I'm kinda assuming WinXP *has* a Boot-to-command-prompt option.. Does it?

AIUI, no. I've used this before on Win98 machines simply to save the bother of making CDs, but loadlin doesn't work at all on XP machines and probably can't.