ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just spent the last 2 days recovering from Mandrake Linux 8.2 fucking up my master boot record and boot sector on my primary hard disk. I had moved everything from my backup drive onto my primary drive to install Linux. Then it was just one problem after another.... (in POST, my mobo even said that Linux was a virus, btw)

Linux 8.2 doesn't like my video card/monitor combination. I tried all three of my video cards on both monitors, and while they recognized, the colors are all mucked up. The colors seem reversed (black is white, etc.).

Then it decided not to default gui mode. Ugh.. no printed documentation to look at. Spent 6 hours guesing the name of the utility to change that.

Finally got back into KDE, colors still reversed. Damn pc started squeeling really loud. Discovered my secondary ide cable was half fallen apart. Then my secondary hard drive was doing some weird crap -- like the gears were messed up.

So, I disconnected everything but my primary drive, only to get a screenfull of zeros and ones when I tried to reboot to XP. Reconnected the secondary drive to boot to Linux, only to find that LILO wouldn't load, and my boot floppy wouldn't woork.

Then I spent all of today trying to figure out what to do to recover. Finally got the guts to try using XP Recovery and running the fixmbr and fixboot commands, cringing at the warnings about loosing parition data.

Wheww... thank god it worked or I would have been screwed for sure. I have 6 years of email, databases, few thousand dollaars worth of programs installed, and essays on that sucker..

All better now Smile Gonna invest in a couple new hard drives and a raid controller just to be on the safe side from now on.

[edit]brewt: oops, sorry, i didn't mean to edit your post.[/edit]

--Philip
Links 2.0 moderator