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Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2005-06-06 19:02:43
aah.. did a full reformat of my machine this weekend. everything is so sparkling clean now.. :) well, almost.
i was going for a triple-boot setup of win2k, mandriva LE 2005 (aka mandrake 10.2), and freebsd 5.4. so first i installed win2k on the first 15-gig primary partition, seeing as how it always clobbers my MBR. got it all setup, ran windows update, set up a firewall, etc. took a while but i was in no hurry.. i had a book handy to keep me company. after i was done, i realized i was only using about 3 gigs of the partition, so i shrunk the partition down to 10 gigs. no problems there.
after that was done, i moved on to extended partition #1, onto which i installed mandriva. the extended partition was about 45 gigs, leaving some room for freebsd and some more space for any other random OS that i might want to try out. set it all up.. there were a couple of minor hitches.
one was with the sound.. mandriva seemed to get confused with the sound cards i have (one is onboard, the other is separate) and although everything seemed to configured properly, no sound was coming out. i ran alsaconfig, which did it's thing and set up the onboard card as the primary one. that was fine.
the other issue was when i set up the network to use DHCP, it would set the search domain to "no-domain-set.bellcanada", which seems to be some misconfiguration on the sympatico dhcp server. regardless, it cost me a 10-second penalty every time it resolved a DNS hostname, which was REALLY annoying. so i ended up just using static IP with the DHCP settings and manually hacking out the search domain. problem solved.
after setting up everything, i decided to boot back into windows and use partition magic to clear out the remaining left-over partitions on my hard drive so i wouldn't have to muck around with FreeBSD's fdisk. problem was, when i tried to boot win2K, it spit out an error message saying it couldn't find ntoskrnl.exe and therefore couldn't boot. so i switched back to linux and mounted the ntfs partition to take a look. guess what? the entire \\WINNT folder had disappeared. poof! i have no idea how this happened.. i hadn't done any repartitioning since the last time i ran it, and it seems unlikely that any changes would have ONLY removed the WINNT folder and nothing else (since everything else was, in fact, still there).
that was annoying, but it was still early on saturday morning, so i decided to go ahead and reinstall windows. that took a few hours.. had to download the updates all over again. i wish microsoft allowed you to download the updates separately (as .msi files or whatever) and keep them around. but meh.
so after that was all done, i got around to installing freebsd. that went pretty smoothly, but it didn't configure X (and I haven't done it yet, either) so right now it's strictly CLI. once i had a basic system up and running, i switched back to linux since i wanted to install other apps and such.
so then at some point on sunday evening, i tried to boot back into windows. guess what? no, really, guess.. yeah, ntoskrnl.exe not found. this time the WINNT folder is still there, but ntoskrnl.exe is nowhere to be found. i suspect it's some sort of virus that's hitting my system before i can get the firewall up. (both times i installed it, i downloaded system updates before the firewall, which probably kept my machine online, unsecured, for at least a couple of hours - enough time to get it infected). i haven't really looked into it too much, and i don't plan to either.. i'm just giving up on that for now. probably use the space for gentoo or something.
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