bobpeers -> blog

After downloading all 3.3GB of Fedora 9 last night it’s time to undo all my hard work over the last few months since Fedora 8 was released and start again with a fresh install.

Most people would think I’m nuts to do this (my girlfriend certainly does) but I get a strange pleasure out of installing a new release and wiping out the old.

I know I’ll have a few issues on the way (Apache always trips me up at some point even though I’ve got all my conf files backed up) but I’ve found that I’ve got much better at getting my system up and running again.

I’ve thought about setting my home partition on a separate partiton so I can save it between installs but having tried this once it just turned into a mess so now I just recover important files from backup after the install.

After all the testing with creating bootable USB drives and trying many different distributions I guess the inevitable had to happen. At some point in my partitioning/formatting of the USB drive I’ve typed

/sbin/mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sda1

instead of

/sbin/mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb1

Only a small error, replacing sdb1 with sda1, but the result is that I reformatted my main Windows XP Professional NTFS partition to FAT32 and in the process lost Windows. I’m not bothered about data loss as I keep anything important in my Linux partition that’s also backed up to a NAS device. What I’m really bothered about is the prospect of reinstalling Windows. In my experience it goes something like this:

1. Boot using my Acer install disk (pre SP1 from 2003).
2. Wait 30 minutes for install to complete.
3. Reboot, listen to annoyingly loud music while setting my computer preferences for the first time.
4. Reboot again.
5. Spend 2 hours (minimum) customizing and uninstalling the crap put on my computer.
6. Go to Windows update and start the painful process of getting a pre SP1 XP Professional computer to SP2. This usually requires 50 to 100 updates along with maybe 3 reboots on the way. Allow at least 3 hours for this with a fast internet connection.

If all goes well the whole process will take an entire evening. Not forgetting that the fresh Windows install will overwrite my mbr so making my dual boot laptop into a single boot Windows only machine requiring me to boot into a live Linux distribution and then installing GRUB on the mbr again. Phew!

Compared to this exercise in time wasting, installing any new Linux distribution these days seems like a walk in the park. I’ll just have to be extra careful in future when formatting drives.