Well that was an interesting couple of days. Why I still insist on getting headaches playing with Linux I don't know. Guess I'm just stubborn Hi!.

Anyway, I decided in a reckless moment to have another go. This time I wanted to load a distro which allowed dual booting, which meant side by side install with Windows of course. Simple!. Erm.....The initial distro, I forget which one now, wouldn't shrink the Windows portion enough to allow a fit. Tried various way to resize/aportion the drive etc. All takes time of course, but eventually I got Mint to intall anyway.

To cut a very long story short I managed to get one distro ie Mint to actually fire up with no problem. This when I eventually figured that maybe the screen was not doing the business due to drivers not being supplied by Mint or Ubuntu, or anyone else for that matter, to kick start my video card (G-Force GT-250) and connected the monitor direct to the mother board instead.

The Mint disc I had available was version 8 and would not update, so I had to download Mint 12 and burn the iso to a boot disc. This took a while of course.

Now you would think that I was now in business. Not so, however, as when I booted up the keyboard would briefly light up, then die, before I could scroll to Windows. In other words I was stuck with Linux only. Oh flip! I said, wondering where I'd stashed my hammer.

I now abandoned the idea of dual booting of course, and now installed Linux to the entire drive to hopefully get to a position where I could re-install Windows from the dvd drive eventually, which I had successfully done after trying Ubuntu 9 and 10 a while back.

I had tried various distro discs prior to full disc install of Mint hoping to get to a stage in the install procedue that would give me an out, as it were, so I could get back to Windows. Unfortunately I had to admit defeat and decided to re-install Windows over the entire disc eventually. Simple!. Erm....

I tried to boot my Windows disc from the dvd drive, but to no avail. Even with the hard drive disabled in the bios, the damn thing would still insist on booting Linux. Totally illogical, but then computers are, aren't they?.

In the end I decided that I was basically 'stitched' with this hard drive, Windows wise, so then had one of my genius moments Hi!. Digging out my old hard drive from a defunct computer and praying it was compatible, which it was, I fitted it in place of the existing Linux job. I was now back in Windows business.

Now I have seperate drives for Windows and Linux which means I can now mess about with the Linux job to my hearts content knowing it doesn't matter if I screw up again *sigh* Of course this means taking the side casing off and transferring a couple of leads each time, but that's no big deal.

If only I had thought of that before I started playing with my existing drive, I could have saved all the hassle entailed with losing everything and having to eventually reintall all my currently used software.

All this took about twelve hours yesterday, which included getting loads of software installed on the Windows drive. Naturally murphies law says some things that did work before, now do not. Ship simulator and Propnet, to name a couple tried so far.

Oh well, at least MMSSTV and Opera are up and running again. Both web editors are also running. Flight Sim 2004 is a go, but I wouldn't be surprised, when I try other sims, not to have problems relating to activation codes used on another drive for instance.

Tea up!