can linux save my life again?

[Josh Coffman]

--- Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 11:16 -0700, Josh Coffman
> wrote:
> > Ok, maybe not my life but my pc. Linux has saved
> my
> > butt a couple times in the last year. I am now
> working
> > from home and built a pc for this purpose. The
> > drawback is that it is as a windows programmer. So
> > windows is the only OS on my desktop. :(
> > 
> > Problem is that I was so excited to get it built
> and
> > working that I forgot to supply the SATA driver to
> the
> > windows install. So it installed the win boot
> loader
> > on a 20 gig partition of a secondary IDE drive;
> and
> > Windows on the first 80 gig of my SATA.
> > 
> > This is not what I really want. I want to boot
> from
> > the SATA drive. And I dont want to spend another
> 15
> > hours installing windows and the software I need.
> > 
> > What I'd like to do is move the windows partition,
> > setup the boot partition, and add Fedora on this
> box.
> > 
> > I was thinking i could use the GParted Live distro
> to
> > move the windows partition, then install Fedora
> and
> > use GRUB to boot windows. (and maybe get VMWare
> > running windows under linux. :)
> > 
> > Does this soudn like it could work?
> ----
[snip]

AS an update, I tried to install fc5 64 bit, thinking
that GRUB would fix my boot problem. (boot sector is
on the secondary drive (IDE) instead of the main drive
(SATA2)).

FC5 64bit install was flawless, but when I tried to
boot windows i got an error sayin hal.dll was corrupt.
I tried restoring from the windows disk, but that
didn't work. tried fixmbr also, thinking is was a
problem with the boot loader.

I ended up reinstalling windows and having to
re-install all my apps I use for work. Major pain. And
now I have to re-register windows again. 

I tried this trick I read about backing up and
restoring a couple wpa files, but that didn't work.
Oh, and I can't find the windows key. /hating MS.

I guess about the best news I could hear now is that
the hal.dll problem is a simple fix in grub.conf; and
that the fc5 repair disk will re-install grub for me.

At any rate, I try again when I have time.

-j






__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com