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Hello,

I spent a fair amount of Thanksgiving weekend putting
my Mom's Windows XP box back on its feet. Not only
was it suffering from a number of viruses, I think it
was having hard drive problems as well. I installed
Norton Antivirus 2004, defragged the disk, had Windows
repair some broken blocks, and still the thing was
suffering. So I bought a second hard drive with the
expectation of simply copying the old stuff to the new
disk.

I had been using Knoppix to evaluate the situation,
even determining which viruses had infected the machine
with f-prot.=20

That's when my sister suggested that I set up my
Mom to use Knoppix. "Of course!" I exclaimed. She
uses Word (=3D> OpenOffice), Email (=3D> Evolution),
and her Browser (=3D> your fav here) and so it was
not going to be difficult to make the switch.
I set about building a dual-boot box, knowing my
Mom would be the first on her block with this setup.

First I partitioned the hard drive to leave room
for a Windows partition. Then, per [1] I ran "knx-hdinstall"=20
and built the Knoppix side of the drive. I followed
all the steps and voila, it was done.=20

Actually, that's not true. I'll spare you the ugly details
about how I installed Knoppix, then switched the drive
positions on the cable and lost a lot of time trying to
fix that before simply reinstalling. And how I lost of
a lot of time building a partition table before running
knx-hdinstall, only to realize that when my various partitions
were mounted, they were hiding files that knoppix had
installed and wanted and couldn't find. The moral was:
just use knx-hdinstall on one big partition (in my case,
about 15 G) and it works.

The harder part was getting the Windows info from the
old drive to the new one. In fact, I never did succeed.
I was able to boot the Knoppix side (and all the hardware
on this HP machine was properly detected) but the Windows
side would not boot. I did an "xcopy" of everything on the
old c: drive to the new NTFS partition, but that did not
suffice. I didn't have an original XP install disk to
use (since I don't think HP included one with the machine).
Also, there was a 5G partition of stuff-from-HP that I
did not copy over to the new disk (though I left room for it).
I'm not sure whether that partition included important bits
for Windows. I doubt it.

The whole thing took much longer than I had hoped, in part
due to the time to copy a lot of data from one (internal)
drive to another (internal) drive. But there should be an
"ideal order" where you copy everything, run lilo once=20
and it works. I didn't find that order this weekend. But
I was pretty excited how easy it was to build a Knoppix
box from an existing Knoppix CD.

_ Ian

[1] http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/debian-knoppix.html


--=20
Ian Jacobs ([email protected])   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447

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