Well, I’m glad I have another 500GB hard drive coming in for dual boot installation of Win7 beta on my 64-bit “hog,” because the two low-spec offline (not in current use) comps were… a ta too low-spec for the 32-bit install. Well, that and the fact that neither could really use the dual channel memory I had available to boost them into “maybe” range.
Sooo, next week. A dual boot system to test Win7 against Ubuntu 8.10 on an AMD dual core with (too many) GiB of RAM and a (ridiculously over-powered for text and typical graphics) nice vidcard, etc. Not bleeding edge, but easily powerful enough to have run Vista had I wanted to.
Mini-micro-nano-update: First reports from Fedex had the hard drive coming in on Saturday the 7th. Nope. Updated this afternoon to Tuesday the 10th. ‘s’all right, though, because I have to try to do some remote system management for a client this weekend. It’ll be interesting, to say the least…
Oh, and the system I’m writing this post from? One of those underpowered computers (old 700Mhz slot 1 P-III) that I popped a bare 80GB hard drive into. Sure, I was only able to scrounge up 256MB of the antiquated memory it uses, but it’s running as well as most computers running XP with 2-4X the memory. Oh, and the hard drive? It was a… problem loading the Win7 DVD onto, because the antiquated motherboard can’t recognize anything larger than a 30Gb drive. *heh*.
So, how’s this system working so well? Puppy Linux. Booted from the CD. Loaded GPartEd and found and partitioned the drive. Loaded Puppy Linux onto it, configured GRUB and… good to go.
Slick OS.
BTW, the Puppy Linux live CD is a very cool troubleshooting tool all by its lonesome. Unlike the “bad old days” of live CDs, once the OS is loaded from the CD, it runs in memory, and when apps are loaded from the CD, they’re loaded and run in memory. Browsers are as close to “instant on” as can be imagined, for example.
But, as a tool for rescuing files from a non-bootable Windows system, a Puppy live CD is the first thing in my bag of tricks, because it reads just about any file system out there. Boot the CD, mount the unbootable drive and start hauling files off to a flash drive or burn ’em to optical media or transfer ’em to another hard drive. If a drive is too trashed for that, then I’ll dig out the data recovery tools.
Oh, and If you decide to use Puppy Linux on a regular basis, installing it to the hard drive is a task that approaches the trivial. Configuring the GRUB bootloader is a tad more messy, but not by much. But one can get almost the entire benefit of installing Puppy to the hard drive by simply installing all the Puppy boot files (as well as the config files and saved sessions–including software installs) to the hard drive and just using the bootloader on the CD. Leaves your original OS untouched and doesn’t even mess with your OS’s bootloader that way.
Just not too shabby. And the Puppy community seems to breed new Puppy versions like crazy. From a ChurchPup, for those who want loads of Christian Bible study and related apps, to multiple Puppy distros aimed specifically at the Asus eeepc, there’re loads of offerings.
Puppy Linux. G’wan, adopt a puppy.