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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.

If you have noticed a gap between this post and my most recent one, there is a good reason for it. Apparantly my computer has been infected with some sort of virus and it has been inoperable for the past week or so.

Here is what happened:

I turned my computer on just like I do every morning, but that particular morning it decided that it wanted to check my disks. After it checked my disks it rebooted. After that initial windows screen with the scrolling squares underneath, the screen went black for about five seconds. Then an error message came up stating that file “ole32.dll” was missing so that it could not start winlogon.exe. Then it gave me the same error message for file lsass.exe. I clicked ok on each of them and the screen just went blank. If you waited long enough it would go to the desktop but nothing would come up. Lame. I tried to restart in safe mode, but no luck. I also tried to restart with the last known good configuration, but that did not work either. It was at this point that I decided that I needed to reinstall Windows XP.

Today was the day that I was to embark on my mission to reinstall Windows XP. The first store that I visited today was the local Best Buy. They were all out there, and the sales associate wasn’t even sure if they were going to keep selling it. Then, I went to the Target next door, and they were all out as well. The sales associate there told me that they would probably be out for a few more days, but the Target about ten miles north of us had two copies in stock.

I left the shopping center on a journey to find the next Target. On my way there I noticed  an Office Depot off the freeway. I thought about it for about two seconds and then darted onto the off-ramp. When I got to the Office Depot, I was immediately greeted by a friendly staff member. I told him that I needed a copy of XP. He brought me over to where they sold their operating systems. I initially went for the $99.99 version, but it turns out that this is the version that you use when you are upgrading from Windows 98 or Windows 2000.  Since this wasn’t the case I went with the standard $184.99 + state and local taxes version. This was the real deal full installation I was told. At this point I was too frusturated to buy the “upgrade” version, take it home and find out it was the wrong version, and then take it back only to find out I couldn’t return it because I had already opened it. I decided to just bite the bullet and get the “Full Meal Deal.” Yes, supersize it.

Now we are current and I am in the process of repairing Windows. It attempted to do the repair about a half an hour ago, but it restarted after 3% completion for some random reason. I did not see why because I was doing laundry in the meantime. I told the setup disk to repair once again, and now we are sitting nicely at 16% in the “h” section of the files. At this rate it should only take another hour. I spoke too soon, it decided to restart again…lovely.
So if I already had XP on my computer, why did I go out and buy a new install disk you might ask. Well…I built this computer myself a year or so ago. This would make me the tech support for when things go wrong. At the time I thought that I could just install windows from the reinstall cd that came with my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. It turns out that it doesn’t quite work like that. Luckily my roommate at the time had a copy of Windows that I could use, and I have used that copy since. Now that I need to reinstall, I don’t have that copy and I was forced to purchace a legitimate version.

Now nothing seems to be working. Hopefully I can figure out this mess and keep all of my old files as well.