Rise of the Penguin
Only three years ago, the difference between Linux distributions and Windows as a viable desktop application was in my opinion very huge. However, I just spent the past week trying to get Windows XP reloaded on a computer that had a motherboard and cpu overhaul. I had decided since everything was torn to pieces that it was a good time to dual-boot with Ubuntu on the desktop, and that is where it got interesting.
Now in most circles, I am considered to be extremely computer literate. I have a pretty broad knowledge of computer hardware, networking, software, web development, so to most people I know a lot about computers. After a while I began to believe that myself, that is until last weekend when the MBR (Master Boot Record) became corrupted on my Windows XP desktop. I won't get into why I was limping along with a 1.5ghz Celeron processor for the past 9 months, just know that I hated logging into that computer and was over joyed to see the processor finally die.
This prompted, the purchase of a new motherboard and processor. Instead of Intel, I went with an AMD64 chipset. I've always had excellent luck with them and since my past poor luck with Intel, what the heck, I went back to basics so to speak. The importance of this article is not the hardware, but to understand that an entirely new set of hardware was implemented. It seems Windows XP hates it when you do that.
The new hardware completed, I fired moved the hard drive over and get into safe mode. I expected problems, but the last transition went fairly well, I thought why not give it another try, since I really didn't have any other choice. Well, the best that could happen was safe mode. This was a great thing, because it was the first time I had seen my tons of unbacked up files since the computer died. I then quickly moved all my files over to a the external hard drive I've had for over a year to back up my files.
After hours and hours of frustration, I finally decided I would delete c: and put win on the new drive. Windows did not like the SATA, it seems it needs drivers, so I did the F6, and it decided those drivers must be on a floppy disk and not on a CD. I dug an old floppy drive out of a skeleton computer in the garage and had it dangling out the side on a ribbon cable in order to do the deed. It seems this old floppy could read but not write. I then had to take a Windows 98 floppy boot disk, put into an old laptop that I have Linux running on, boot it into DOS, to run a CD and copy drivers onto a blank floppy, to put into the desktop to get Windows XP to load onto a hard disk. I have of course left out the trial and error I went through to come to that conclusion. I should also add that Ubuntu loaded on partition 2 of disk 2 loaded everything perfectly, recognized every last piece of my hardware and worked seamlessly with my system. I think it's also important to note that I had put the wrong version of Ubuntu on my system, and it still worked.