Code Emitter

I’m up to switch to Linux now – definitively. I’m already using Debian for our servers for a couple of years now and because I have done some heavy development in the last few months that could be so much easier using some Linux deriviate, I think that now is the time.

As the most people who need to switch between both worlds sometimes, I installed a fresh copy of the newest linux distributions from time to time in the past but I could not chum up with it in the end because of the impossibility to play games (yey, I’m somewhat older now ;)) and to run some essential tools (at least for me). In the last few weeks I once more took notice of the ongoing efforts in the linux scene to make Linux a first choice also for desktops including the more and more progressing wine windows layer. So, I’ll go for Ubuntu now as it seems to be the most popular desktop Linux available and forms a perfect match with my humble Debian experience. I know, Debian could do the job too, but it might be easier for me to count on the advancing Ubuntu community for desktops. Of course, my Windows OS will stay for testing and gaming :).

So then, I’ll finish backing up my stuff – wish me luck that I’ll go through it once and for all without killing my partition table :).

A few hours later: Guess what… ^^
The current result of my efforts is a previously half-filled corrupted partition of 400 GB in total size because my computer just turned off for absolutely no reason while resizing / moving it and the used partitioning program sucks in all kinds of protections agains this. Ok, I backed up all the really important stuff but this screwed up my initial enthusiasm definitely. All attempts to continue with rescue disks etc. did not work out. So, it will take a while till I have restored all the data. However, I already located the old MFT and I hope that not too much damage was done so that I can reanimate it with most of the files still beeing intact. If the program is not too idiotic, it tried to move the files one by one by updating the previous MFT, so that there is max. 1 corrupted file – but I doubt that this piece of s…oftware was clever enough ;). The recue process will run for 22 hours now, so if you do not hear from me for a while, you know what I am waiting for…cheers!

Another few hours later:
I managed to restore the partition table with an excelent tool named TestDisk. However, Vista seems to be somewhat damanged afterwards but the most contents seem to be still intact. I’ll head to my favorite computer parts store later and buy a bigger external disk so that I can kill the damaged partition entirely when all the data is moved. Nice Job, TestDisk! For all of you considering to buy a commercial partition management tool – buy it if you like, but never ever use it if you have no idea how to get your data back on failure! :)

I feel lucky!
Ok then, recovery worked out pretty well in the end, I backed up some more medium-important data already and chkdsk fixed the remaining issues. Say that I am crazy but I’m currently retrying the resize and move process with a newer version of the partitioning app that screwed it up before :). The only change is, that I’m running it on the same partition marked as inactive from within Vista instead of using the ugly dos-look-on-restart interface ^^.

Q.E.D.
Guess what…again ^^. “Do you really want to remove XY from your computer? Yes/No”. But I got a fresh big external disk now. Think it’ll be a lot of fun to copy 200 GB via USB at effectively about 80GB/h ;).

Finally…
I am on Ubuntu now. However, my Vista partition is dead and I need to reinstall a fresh one later. The hard part was to make my intel fake raid, that claimed to be a real hardware raid, work somehow using the experimental dmraid package. So then, time to get some sleep.

Added Browserpark
Because Vista was killed somewhen in the process, I decided to switch back to XP for my Windows work. One of the first things to do was to setup a fresh browser park for cross browser development again and as far as I can tell, I got all the major browser aboard – IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Safari 3. Unfortunately I could not get any version of IE running on Wine inside Ubuntu, d’oh - it just crasahes.