The Plan – By the end of 2003, shift usage of home PC from mostly Windows to mostly Linux.
Windows XP forced my hand a little earlier than I had planned. As of late, I have probably been spending about a third of the time booted into Linux instead of XP. However, when I returned from vacation last week, my PC (Dell Dimension 4400) refused to boot into Windows. About halfway into the boot process, a small blue screen would appear for about quarter of a second and then disappear. Then I would get a screen offering me the option to boot into safe mode. Even in safe mode, no dice.
Fortunately, I had a stable operating system (Red Hat 9) installed on a second hard drive I had added about a year ago. I was able to boot into Linux successfully. After several more attempts to boot Windows, I decided that the data was most important and I gave up on getting Windows to boot.
A quick web search turned up an open source project for a Linux kernel driver for NTFS. Even better, the project supplied an RPM for Red Hat 9. Within about two minutes, I had downloaded the correct RPM, installed it, mounted the NTFS partition, and started copying the files to a Linux partition. WooHoo!
Goodbye, Windows. I knew ya entirely too well.
Hey Robert,
I’ve been reading your “linux” category today, as I try to make a decision about which distribution to use for my first venture into this OS. I would like to DL it, partition HD and maintain Windows so I can see if I like Linux. How did you decide originally on Red Hat? Why did you later switch to Fedora? Thanks!!