Historically, I have had… how should I put it… something of a nack for turning my computers (individually or collectively) into very expensive paper weights for short periods of time, while trying to do things that wiser people would avoid (usually involving playing with bits of operating systems in ways they probably weren’t designed to handle).
I play with the registry, and then have to reinstall my computer.
I resize partitions, and when it fails (as it usually does for me) I have to reinstall my computer.
Sometimes I don’t even do anything particuarly exciting, like upgrading software, or moving files, or upgrading hard-drives, and.. well I think you’re probably sensing a theme by now.
Now my family and friends know this is how I do things, and just point and snigger that “Dave’s done it again”, while I find it a (generally) a combination of a great way to learn about how operating systems are set up, and a pleasant little activity to keep me happily amused for a period of time usually equivalent to an afternoon (if you ignore the irritation when my efforts cause me to loose old emails or files or the like).
To quote Douglas Adams “I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds’ worth of it is well worth the investment of a day’s happy activity working out a way of saving it.”
So to get to the actual point of this blog entry, I have (and I should probably touch wood right now, although the fake veneer on my desk will have to do) somehow managed to navigate my way through a veritable mine-field of re-install-your-computer prone activities this afternoon, and have somehow managed to come out the other side without having to reinstall anything.
Having finally gotten a computer with a large enough hard drive for me to reasonably run two operating systems at once, I decided to install Linux to dual boot on my machine (ie. my machine can load Linux or Windows, depending on which one I select).
Now to set this up I had to resize the partition that Windows is currently installed on, create 3 new partitions, and install Linux, making sure it didn’t do anything stupid (like putting the program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to load onto the same drive as Windows – apparently windows really really doesn’t like that).
Any one of these things could have (and historically would have) gone wrong and required me to delete everything and set everything up again from scratch, and yet strangely they didn’t and here I am, writing this blog from within Linux.