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Off-topic forums => Completely Unrelated => Topic started by: Midgar on 2007-03-18 03:50:27
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Starting on last Friday I started a horrible trend of cr4ppyness in general. First of all I tried partitionmagic. No worries pirated it off something and then when I was off deleting my old stuff so I could try out a linux partition, IT happened. Beginning with partition magic turning my 200+GB partition into a piece of trash, I started my horrible week.
After it ruined my partition in general, I spent the whole saturday and also sunday morning trying to save my files, which I used GETDATABACK for NTFS which proved to be efficent and generally good, but only after wading though the crap in which I spent over 13 good hours trying to figure out. Eventually though I choose GETDATABACK, and it spent a good 3 hours trying to figure out the jargon that I couldn't. Well anyways I thought all was good, until I l realized that I needed an exteral hard drive to store all the information to. I had to beg for about 4 hours before I got one, and when I sent it there, I was so happy that everything was going to be OK. It took the whole night to copy, but I thought, who cares right? Everythings going to be OK.
When I later installed PCLinuxOS, I had no idea that everything was going to be so.. different. I copied everything to a nice partition for them, and then, I had a terrible problem with the mount /, in which I repartitioned my hard drive and it was just a very very bad thing. I recopied everything from the External again, and then the problem happened again. I had a good friend named Dashed on the internet help me fix this horrible error, and to my great surpise and his own, all I needed to do was mount /(namehere) and it would work. Great! When I accesed my files, I had no idea some of them would not work. It was horrible because some of the stuff was difficult to get or was now impossible for me to get. I saved the filenames, but thats only if they still exist, which I'm sure some of them don't.
Anyways, I started up Beryl, and lo and behold more errors. I wanted my resolution to be greater, and then that horrible LCD I had could not display it's non native resolution. I had to ask for some more help, in which I edited another very important display file, with the help of BadWolf. When I reinstalled PCLOS for the third time, and installed beryl with no problems, except that it had no minimize, maximize or exit, and when I listened to a few posters on some forums, I suppose I must had written some things wrong when editing my nvida files, and then it refused to work.
I broke xorg.conf... thats what the GUI in linux draws from, and after I fixed it, I realized that KDE would not start up because I for some reason had broken that too. So then I burnt BulletXP twice, and both times they did not work because for some reason I get a 0xoooooo7B error. Thats when I decided to delete my / partition and lo and behold BulletXP does not work again! I had some Dell one though, which I'm glad I kept and it worked fine. Now here are some things I would like to suggest if you are planning on trying linux.
Beware that although linux does everything windows does, it may do it "wrong". I missed foobar2000, which had unrar support (you didn't need to unzip your songs) and Irfanview in which I was able to press the directional keys to change pages. They had Amarok and Kview, which did the same thing, as they were a media player and also an image processor, but they did not act as I wanted them to.
PCLinuxOS has some odd problems. They do not automaticly correct themselves. The LCD which did not display at certain settings was a prime example of that, and most laymen would rather have an idiotproof system such as the will revert in 10 seconds found in Windows. Not sure if it does this in Ubuntu but I'm guessing its harder to break with GNOME, althought I hate the interface.
I don't mind if you laugh or if you don't understand heres what happened in layman's terms.
I broke my computer, by:
reinstalling 12x times total, of PCLinuxOS and Windows combined.
Destroying maybe 5% of data, the 5% required to run a few programs and some media.
Wasting about a week doing all of this.
Trying to learn linux while trying to get my computer to work half of the time.
Thanks for reading.
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Beware that although linux does everything windows does, it may do it "wrong". I missed foobar2000, which had unrar support (you didn't need to unzip your songs) and Irfanview in which I was able to press the directional keys to change pages. They had Amarok and Kview, which did the same thing, as they were a media player and also an image processor, but they did not act as I wanted them to.
Gwenview is very good and extremely customizable image viewer. Don't know if it can be set up to mimic Irfanview, but it can do a pretty good job of acting like old ACDSee. Including almost total freedom to set key mappings.
As for Amarok... well, it's a bloated iTunes wannabe anyway. Good one, if you are looking for that functionality, but there are much lighter alternatives if a mere mp3 player will do. Not sure if there are any that can read archives, but then again; there are not very many good reasons to keep your mp3s in archives anyway. It's not like they'd shrink any smaller and possible media error can take out the entire archive, instead of a single MP3, should one happen.
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Please edit it and use the enter button more often before i'm gonna read it.
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Please edit it and use the enter button more often before i'm gonna read it.
You're gonna read it out of boredom anyways.
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Please edit it and use the enter button more often before i'm gonna read it.
You're gonna read it out of boredom anyways.
Have to be bored first then ;)
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Please edit it and use the enter button more often before i'm gonna read it.
You're gonna read it out of boredom anyways.
Have to be bored first then ;)
Well I am not going to read it either - did you start with Linux, or did you add Linux after having Windows installed?
The first few times you play with Linux will always use up 3-5 days worth of your time - trust me I know.
I got so fed up I just stuck with command line Linux to run my fileserver pc.
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Please edit it and use the enter button more often before i'm gonna read it.
You're gonna read it out of boredom anyways.
Have to be bored first then ;)
Well I am not going to read it either - did you start with Linux, or did you add Linux after having Windows installed?
The first few times you play with Linux will always use up 3-5 days worth of your time - trust me I know.
I got so fed up I just stuck with command line Linux to run my fileserver pc.
Well fine I'll fix my story so you can read. Two is enough to convince me.
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Midgar - You didn't answer the question what exactly did you try to do with Partition Magic?
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Oh, sorry. :-D
I was trying to resize my NTFS partition. And then it froze and I restarted my computer.
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ouch.
They always warn you to back up before doing that, I never have but I been lucky in the past.
If you want to play with another OS its safer to just stick a new hard drive in a spare IDE slot.
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I would have if Dell made their stupid computers with an IDE slot. I don't know why the stopped using them on the crappy phoenix motherboards.
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Can always use a USB hard disk instead if your machine is too new to have IDE in it.
BTW you shouldn't be buying Dell desktops for anything other then your first ever PC :)
Unless you are crazy and want to waste money on those expensive XPS SLi desktops - choice is yours.
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Didn't have an external. :-( Yes I know, everyone NEEDs and external but I still didn't get one. Dells are OK but you are correct, I told my dad and he never listens to me because I'm 'younger' and 'inexperienced'.
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Well you can tell him to go buy one with Linux preinstalled, should teach him not to have done his research..