A Ghosty Adventure

Or, “Why I use Linux”.

So, it started off the way any other good story does, I decided to backup my computer, popped out a Norton Ghost CD, and installed it.  It all seemed very nice in windows, and the way it rebooted to the DOS part wasn’t too bad either.

That was, until I decided to boot back into normal computer mode.  (Note how I avoid saying “Windows”).  It turns out to boot into DOS mode, Ghost tried to overwrite both my windows partition MBR and my main harddisk MBR.  So, to reinstall GRUB on my main harddisk MBR was dead easy – boot up a gentoo livecd, run grub-install, and I’m done.  However, now I needed to reinstall my windows MBR.  First I had to go and find an XP install CD.  After finally getting into the recovery console, I realised it hadn’t detected my RAID.  Then I had to go to the gigabyte website and download a floppy image, which for some reason was an EXE file.  So I had to go find another windows computer to install the EXE onto a floppy, then get the XP installer to load the RAID drivers.

So, I finally get into the recovery console, and it has detected my windows partition.  It asks for administrator password.  Oops.  After trying three passwords I thought it was, the installer decides to reboot my computer.  So, in an attempt to try again with some other passwords, I boot back into the windows installer.  But this time, the second I get to the recovery console, it reboots, instantly.  Bugger.

So, after trying to reset the password a number of ways and failing, I give up.  Gentoo and debian it is.