Older blog entries for Josiah (starting at number 1)

Well, it's been over two weeks since my last diary entry. I guess I'll start where I left off, the night of the Linux install.

I've installed linux before and thought this would be the same type of thing, just pop the CD in, intall the packages I want, and then reboot to a LILO prompt. Not this time, I install, reboot, and am welcomed by the lovely Windows 2000 boot up screen. Oops. Maybe it screwed up near the end, the X-Window at the time when it was finishing up looks kind of strange, I'll reinstall. Same thing. Well fugg. Maybe Windows 2000 doesn't like having other OS's on the machine. That's simple, I'll just delete Windows 2000. I then wave good-bye to Windows for the last time. Litereally waving, and grinning, and waving. "Buh-bye! Buh-bye!"

This time during my Linux install I deleted the Windows 2000 partition (keeping my fat32 data partition that I store at the end of the drive). I reboot and am greeted with the friendly message "No OS found." Gee, that sucks, maybe my Redhat 6.1 CD is bad, lets try a different distro I know works, Mandrake 7.0. "No OS found." Well, I guess getting rid of the Windows 2000 partition doesn't make Windows any friendlier. Maybe if I get Partition Magic in there working on the boot sector I'll be able to get it working. So Partition Magic runs and tells me that one of the partitions is to large and asks me if I want to let it fix the partition. Sure! So after that, PM finishs loading and tells me that the entire disk is one bad partition. *eek!*

Well, it might just be PM, so I try to install Linux again and get nada for my data partition. Getting a little scared, I make a DOS bootdisk with fdisk on it and hope that that might fix it thinking that Win2K does bad things to the master bootrecord. So an one "fdisk /mbr" later, I am able to go c: and see all my lovely data. So what's my next move? Well, of course I try to screw up everything I have accomplished! Thinking that the MBR is fixed, I actually belived that maybe Linux will install. Nope. "No OS found." I twiddle with the PM/fdisk/diskdruid/install linux thing for a few more hours and finally give up being able to acess that c drive with my data. It had been over 10 hours and I got almost nothing accomplished.

I figure the next step would be to back up that data that I love so much on a friends hard drive, and just format the entire drive. My friend sleeps late however, so I got some sleep while waiting for the right time to go over to his house. I pop out my hard drive, put it in an anti-static bag, and make my way over to wake his sleeply butt up. He is nice enough to loan me 600 megs for a few days while I get my computer working, and I get to go home knowing that my data is safe.

(On a side note to this story, I got to watch him play Diablo II. It seems alot like the normal Diablo but with a few added extras. A little more strategy with the items. It steels an idea from FF7 about adding gems to weapons/armour that give you special abilities/upgrades. I'd buy it if it ran in Linux or if I could use to same CD to play the game in both Linux and Windows if I ever make the trip back to M$ land.)

When I get home, I try to grab some more sleep before I begin battleing the evil Win2K mbr. With my data safe, I start up Partition Magic and fry the entire drive. A complete format. Once again, I try to install Redhat 6.1, reboot and find the same message "No OS found." Arg! Does it never die? I scroung around my box of computer stuff and find the manucaturers disk that fixs all things hard-drive. This time I format it for real and get linux up and running.

Victory.

To be continued...

Got the brand new Amiga SDK today, and decided that it wouldn't be a bad idea to create a developer journal to keep track of my progress on the new system. I'll be up all night installing and testing. I still need to install Redhat 6.1, the SDK, and start learning VPcode, the Amiga version of a "portable" assembly language.

In a few days, I'll probably start work on porting snes9x and on writing some free tutorials about working with the new system because the SDK comes in at a whopping $99 and people should be able to get a feel for it before they go out and spend that kind of money.

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