ccady's Journal: Linux really is fun.

I brought my home machine's hard drive in to a CompUSA, even though I despise buying stuff there, to get themto copy the contents of my older 30GB IBM hard drive onto a new 60GB Toshiba drive. (Since I only have laptops, I have no machine which I can easily put both disks into to do the swap myself.) It's worth the $50 to me if they do not botch the job. I am putting a whole lot of trust in them. They say they can copy the NTFS and VFAT (FAT32) partitions, but they do not know if their software (DriveImage) can copy the ext2 partition. I am pretty sure it will work.

[Just in: CompUSA called back and said that they cannot read *any* of the partitions on the drive. DriveImage gives them a "partition not accessible" error. WTF? "David" says that it might be because I have GRUB installed as the bootloader. I think they have no clue what they are doing, and that my best course of action is to remove my hard disk from their premises ASAP.]

Where does this leave me? I am running on a machine without any version of Linux, just Windows XP. I have avoided putting Linux on the box until now, for fear I would spend too much time tinkering with it, and not getting work done (my work involves writing .NET code), but now that our contract is due to expire, I think I will take the plunge. The problem is that the Dell C400's video chip, an Intel I830, is brain-dead and Linux has a hard time dealing with it.