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I have spent the majority of my day today attempting to reinstall windows XP on my PC. The main dilemma that I had was that I could not even start windows, which was the reason that I had to reinstall in the first place. Because I could not start windows, I was unable to back up my files. In order to back up these files, I ended up spending the majority of my time trying to find out how to go about doing this.

What ended up happening was that I had to use a program called Knoppix. From what I gathered, Knoppix is the CD version of the Linux operating system. This means that you don’t have to install Linux/Knoppix on your hard drive for it to work. All the files that your computer needs are on the CD.

To get Knoppix onto a CD, you first need a working computer which I luckily had. Then, you must go to the main Knoppix website to download the latest edition. After you download, you can then burn the .iso file to a CD. Next, you will need to set up your boot menu on the broken computer so that it boots from CD first and then Hard drive. This way it will automatically boot into the Knoppix program.

Once I got this all set up, I had some initial struggles getting the program to work. It seemed like everything was working alright,  but then the screen would go blank and say “out of range.” I think this happened because the screen that I was using was an LCD 19″ screen. After doing a bit of research I found out that if you hit F3 at the first screen, you can enter special setup commands. The command that got my screen was “knoppix vga=0″. After that everything worked perfectly more or less.

From time to time the Knoppix system kept crashing on my while I was trying to transfer files. I wasn’t expecting perfection, but this was getting annoying. I tried to find some other Linux programs to run. The ones I came across were “Damn Small Linux” and “Slax.” I found Damn Small Linux to be about worthless, but I don’t think I knew what I was doing. For some reason it wouldn’t let me access my files on my hard drive. Slax kept crashing, so I was even more worthless to me.

I decided to go back to Knoppix because that was the only one that had worked for the most part so far. When I went into the F3 screen I noticed that there were some other available commands. One I believe was called “toram.” This command temporarily installed Knoppix on the RAM in your computer. This allows the program to run entirely off of the RAM rather than constantly trying to read the CD. Once I applied this fix my crashes were but a distant memory. Also, everything ran a whole lot faster as well.

There was one annoying quirk about Knoppix. The reason I was using it in the first place was so that I could transfer files from my main hard drive to my external hard drive to be backed up. The problem I ran into was if my external was on and plugged in when I started Knoppix, then the main hard drive would not show up. If I started up Knoppix with the external off, then it would detect the main hard drive. It was only at this point where I could start up the external. Once that was detected everything worked fine.

In conclusion, I must say that Knoppix has saved my files from being deleted on the reinstall. If I were a bit more computer savvy, I could see myself switching over to Linux. It seems like they have their act together a bit more than Microsoft when it comes to certain things.