NTFS external drive

For fun, I checked my external drive while booted in Windows. Oh no! It needed to be defragmented! Defrag recommended CHKDSK as well.

Big mistake: One or both of them scattered a lot of my backup files (including the backups of this blog - quite a few entries gone until they turn up again). I'm afraid to look at my music...or my collection of Futurama episodes. Only fix is to hunt through the 'found' folder and put stuff away manually. Big mess.

Reinstallation fallout

<p>So far, only three problems with the reinstallation.</p>
<ol>
  <li>Some data from my shared partition was lost - my backup wasn't as thorough as I thought. I also had to reenter all my e-mail accounts to Evolution (backup copy on the Mac, whew). Nothing critical, just minor annoyances...and a couple Doctor Who episodes.</li>
  <li>The trackpad was fine for the first day, then suddenly became jumpy and unusable today. Looking through various forums, it seems I'm not alone. May or may not be related to the reinstall. On Windows, it was intermittent. On Xubuntu, it's always bad.</li>
  <li>Sound works great on Windows, no sound at all in Xubuntu.  Well, I kind of expected it...</li>
</ol

Dual Boot (Win XP / Linux) Reconstruction

<p>I decided not to wait until April...</p>
<p>Downloaded and burned an Ubuntu 7.10 Alternate CD. Reinstalled Windows (snore, 1 hour of installing, 2 hours of updating and faddle). Installed Ubuntu 7.10.</p>
<p>Uh-oh. No I didn't. The Ubuntu CD was corrupt, and instead hosed everything again.</p>
<p>Reinstall Windows while using the Mac to download and burn an Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD.</p>
<p>The live CD passes the self-test, but then is no longer recognized as bootable by the laptop.</p>
<p>Use the installed Windows to download and burn Xubuntu 7.10 live CD. At the same time, installed Quickbooks and Openoffice, and de-bloated the tiny (10GB) Win partition. Even used the 'compression' feature to squeeze 2.5 GB free space.</p>
<p>Install Xubuntu 7.10 - Success! Lots of adding and updating, but it's done. The laptop is usable again.</p>