Damn Small Linux is Damn Fine

Thanks to Damn Small Linux, I’ve successfully recovered my laptop! Happy days!

Basically, I just burned a CD with the 0.8.3 ISO image, and booted directly from it. It detected all the hardware appropriately, including grabbing network connections and my USB keyboard and mouse. Then I typed mount /mnt/hda1 and lo! I was able to access all the program settings, FeedDemon data, bookmark collections, and all my email archives and just tarball everything and scp it to my server box. No idea why Windows wasn’t interested in booting, but I do know that it had been playing up a fair amount recently, and I’d been considering doing a reinstall of Windows. Since it has basically saved my on-line life, I made a donation to the project.

To be fair, Sony have a well designed system on this laptop (a VAIO GR414), whereby they’ve split the hard drive in two, and recommend you put as much as possible on the D: partition. The recovery disk will only wipe out the C: partition (although I backed up D: just in case!). One slightly annoying point was that the recovery disk told me that back up software was not available, and that I should go back into Windows to back up my settings and data; how do you propose I do that, then? Grrr.

So now I’m the proud owner of SP2 as well, and I’m still reinstalling all my favourite software in the latest editions. I also took the opportunity to check out NOD Anti-virus software, which looks very good to me. And is a bit cheaper than some of the other options as well. It seems to run pretty much seamlessly, even for email scanning, unlike the others which take over the settings of your mail program.

Anyway, it’s nice to have a clean desktop for once in my life, as well as a machine that runs noticably faster than it did this time last week :-)

Now I can get on with some work…