Kazza the Blank One

So tonight I thought I'd have another go at installing Windows 7 but as a new install instead of an upgrade (which wouldn't work because you need to be in windows in order to run the upgrade).

But after some time of it extracting files, it gave this lovely friendly error:

Windows cannot access the installation sources. Verify that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation.

*yay*

Googling tended to indicate that probably the hard drive was fubar.  Fine.  Well lets see if I can boot off a live CD and mount my drive and see what can be salvaged.

The two knoppix cds I have refused to boot (the old Neither of my Knoppix cds boot. Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry. error) so tried a Suse cd Simon burnt me last year.  This thing *just worked* first go, even on the network. 

So figured out how to mount the internal drive  ( mount -t ntfs /dev/sda3 /mnt ) and then attached a memory stick.   Was able to retrieve the file I most wanted to.  But had all sorts of problems with the drive staying online (and getting lots of I/O errors in the syslog).  Stu brought home a large hard drive for me to copy files to, but Suse kept wanting to make the NTFS drive read only.  Tried a few things, but in the end just formatted the disk as linux.  Will be able to copy off from a live CD if need be.

So I'm currently copying off what I can from stuff I know I've modified in the past few weeks.

The plan is to buy a new drive as soon as possible, install Windows 7 on it (Windows will be on a separate partition this time!!), then restore/retrieve my data from backups.  The medium term plan is to get a file server so can actually do daily backups, instead of backups every couple of weeks when I bring home hard drives to backup to.

I kinda like this Suse thingie too.  May even setup a virtual machine with it on at some point.