I spent essentially all of yesterday helping a friend recover from a Windows virus cluster....
Apparently, her (fairly recent) laptop had been accumulating viriuses for some time, despite a commercial antivirus package, perhaps explaining how a 3 GHz Pentium 4 managed to be slow. A few days ago, she'd installed Win XP Service Pack 2, which apparently wasn't compatible with one or more of the installed viruses, leading to strange hangs and crashes.
So, we backed up her documents and whatnot to a USB hard drive, and thence to a DVD, and commenced to do a clean re-install of Windows.
Discovery #1: The built-in CD-burning software in Win XP won't let you back up your "documents and settings" directory to CD. Apparently the temporary directory lives under "documents and settings," and trying to back it up gets recursive. Hence, the use of the USB drive....
Discovery #2: If you try to copy your entire "documents and settings" directory to a USB hard drive, Windows will complain about one file being in use, and abort the whole freakin' copy. There's no "skip this file and do the best you can" option, as far as I can tell. (But then I don't claim to be a Windows guru, but then Windows is supposed to be so easy to use that there's no need for a user manual or anything.)
Discovery #3: If you have a Windows XP Home Edition install disk, and your computer has a broken installation of XP with SP2 installed, there's no such thing as a re-install: the installer will complain that the installed version is newer, and refuse to do anything. Solution: Boot the Slackware install disk, and use cfdisk to remove the NTFS partition. Next!
Discovery #4: Not only is the re-installable "pre-installed software" for the Dell laptop in question spread across several disks, but, within a disk, there's no "install everything applicable" button. You have to install the drivers one at a time, with each one taking half a dozen clicks. Grrrrr....
Well, we did eventually get it all put back together, and it runs much faster now.
Another fun Windows fact: if you plug a USB hard drive, with an unformatted VFAT partition, into a Win XP Home system, and attempt to format the partition, you'll be offered a choice of filesystem formats. The list of available formats is as follows: NTFS. If you want a VFAT partition on your removable hard drive (so, like, you can exchange data with Linux or even Win 98), it's back to Linux. If it's a large partition, you'll need to tell mkfs to use the 32-bit FAT option:
mkfs -t vfat -F 32 /dev/sda2
And you wonder why the IT guys are always so cranky...
Recent Comments