Sunday, August 26, 2007

Fresh XP Install/ Re-Install

I figured a great place to start would be the fresh, or rather re-fresh, install of my XP OS. This is about the third time I have re-installed my OS, the first one being because of a virus problem and the second because of a new hard drive purchase. Oh yeah, I tried one other time when I bought an SATA HDD that wasn't supported by my mobo and which I had to thereby run from a PCI card and learn the hard lesson that A) the drivers for SATA drives have to be installed from a floppy (which I do have) when installing XP (via F6 at the beginning of the installation) and B) even with said floppy I still could not make a drive controlled through the PCI slot the boot drive. Oh well, this is why I love to play and make mistakes, to learn these things. And this is one reason, really the main reason, I started this blog - to create my own manual of sorts... A record of the mistakes and the solutions that I was (usually) able to come up with.
I have found the web to be somewhat filled with others making the same sort of documentation and have frequently found such blogs/ sites/ forum entries to be very helpful and usually fairly specific to the problem I am having, as compared to a manual or faq, and so this is my contribution as well.

So, I reformatted my 300G WD HDD using puppy 2.14 booted from the cd drive, and then gparted. I love puppy!! But that is for another blog or seven...
My partition table ended up looking like this:
Primary: 30G NTFS OS and all installed programs; I like to keep these separate and make frequent backups so if anything goes wrong I can quickly re-install. My previous partition was about 14G total size with lots of crap I didn't need or use

Extended: 25G total
19G free space for installation of a dual boot, probably ubuntu, when I decide to. I did this once before and it was fine, but I prefer to just use virtual machines rather than going through the 'trouble' of dual booting. Oh, I'll write a lot about virtual machines in future blogs...
3G ext 2 for 'frugal install' of puppy - eventually
1G linux swap
2G fat 32 for file sharing between puppy and windows

Primary: 95G NTFS VMWare Workstation Machines and downloaded installation (exe) files

Primary: 150G NTFS Documents, file storage, etc. I tried to make this an extended as well to break up my documents and storage, but it would not let me so I am assuming you are only allowed one extended partition. I think I remember some way to make a partition as storage only - so that nothing (like a virus that I might download with a torrent ;) ) can be executed from it. I can't remember and any advice would be appreciated!

Okay, that's enough for now - next time the installation process (which promises to be just as boring)

1 comment:

Donnie said...

Okay, I'll leave myself some obvious advice - stop downloading stuff that might have viruses! ie torrents of cracked progs.
Okay okay, I am getting away from this and soon I will be writing a list of my favorite freeware...