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Duel boot?

Doubt

Philosopher
Doubt
Joined
Apr 25, 2002
Messages
8,106
Getting ready to reformat a hard drive on my desktop machine. I have two 80 gig disks. One has a slightly corrupt XP installation on it. I cannot access my admin account on it. (Tried tools that were out there to reset the password. No luck, it just is dead.) The main user account still works so I am going to set up a duel boot system. And the computer only came with recovery disks rather than a real XP disks!

The current corrupt system will stay on the current main drive and a fresh “recovery’ will be made on the other drive. I already have made ghost images of both the drives just in case I smeg up the job.

Questions:

1.) What is the best software for the duel boot? (Open source would be great.)
2.) What is good for anti-virus software? (I am starting to hate Symantec products.)
3.) Is Open Office any good? Comparable to MS Office 2003? (Starting to hate Microsquish too.)
4.) Any other advice?

This is not my first recovery on this machine. The reason there are two drives in it is because the original install also ended up corrupt and I was not doing back ups until recently. I did the current install on what was a new drive and kept the original as a back up drive and source for my old files.

I am pretty sure I will have to change the cable around on the drives. I think I have them set up for cable select, but it has been a while since I went inside the box.

All of this is only of concern so I can run Civ IV. Cannot install without the admin account. I have it on my laptop right now. Celerons and Civ IV should never cross paths. To frigging slow!
 
Dual. What brand? Compaq disks are labeled recovery disks but one is actually just an XP disk and can be used anywhere.
 
Cannot remember what they called it. Not a major brand name.

The recovery disks are just that. Not real XP disks. All they want to do is re-install the whole thing.

(XP home version, not pro.)
 
Doubt said:
Getting ready to reformat a hard drive on my desktop machine. I have two 80 gig disks. One has a slightly corrupt XP installation on it. I cannot access my admin account on it. (Tried tools that were out there to reset the password. No luck, it just is dead.) The main user account still works so I am going to set up a duel boot system. And the computer only came with recovery disks rather than a real XP disks!

The current corrupt system will stay on the current main drive and a fresh “recovery’ will be made on the other drive. I already have made ghost images of both the drives just in case I smeg up the job.

Questions:

1.) What is the best software for the duel boot? (Open source would be great.)
2.) What is good for anti-virus software? (I am starting to hate Symantec products.)
3.) Is Open Office any good? Comparable to MS Office 2003? (Starting to hate Microsquish too.)
4.) Any other advice?

This is not my first recovery on this machine. The reason there are two drives in it is because the original install also ended up corrupt and I was not doing back ups until recently. I did the current install on what was a new drive and kept the original as a back up drive and source for my old files.

I am pretty sure I will have to change the cable around on the drives. I think I have them set up for cable select, but it has been a while since I went inside the box.

All of this is only of concern so I can run Civ IV. Cannot install without the admin account. I have it on my laptop right now. Celerons and Civ IV should never cross paths. To frigging slow!
Click to expand...
1) If you're only dual-booting Windows, just use what's in Windows itself to select which OS you want upon boot.

2) Don't know. Never used AV software in 13 years of PC computing. It causes more problems than it solves, ime. The best AV software, imo, is your brain and resisting clicking on offers to increase your manhood or see 16 year-old latino girls ride ponies. :)

3) Open Office is OK if you don't use it for much more than simple text files. If you use or create complex documents, MS Office is like Porche - There is no substitute.

4) Yes. Make sure you disconnect the drive containing the existing Windows install when creating the new install. It doesn't happen in all cases, but the Windows install process has this nasty tendency on some system configurations to screw the pooch when it detects another version already existing on another drive. It does it on my system. It will get all the way through the install and on the first reboot it blue screens.
 
Doubt said:
From what I have read, XP pro does that. XP home does not.
Click to expand...
XP Home does it as well. It's accomplished by using the boot.ini file.

ETA: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q306559/

ETA2: Oops. Wrong link. Ignore the link above as MS doesn't like you installing multiple instaces of the same OS. But it can be done in any version of XP so long as they are on different partitions (obviously).
 
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Not sure I'm seeing why you need to dual boot. What two OSs do you intend to run?

Open Office sucks as much as MS Office. Its price takes much of the sting out. I just don't like office suites. I like Excel, despise Word and Powerpoint. I use the OO spreadsheet but none of the other bits. My kids manage with OO just fine for school work.
 
jimlintott said:
Not sure I'm seeing why you need to dual boot. What two OSs do you intend to run?
Click to expand...

Both will be XP. If I had a "real" install disk for XP, there would be no issue. But I cannot just reinstall windows on the current hard drive without wipeing out what is there now. And I would prefer not to re-install every damn bit of software I use again. This way I can keep my data and programs intact for now and get a fresh start going on the other drive.
 
Whoops. Saw the thread title and thought it had something to do with obtaining footwear suitable for getting into an ass-kicking contest.

Never mind. Carry on.

ETA: Regarding AV software, I can't decide which I like better, AVG or AntiVir. So I have them both loaded on my machine, update the virus definition files nightly, have one do scans every night, the other once a week, and I have one (I forget which) load its memory-resident module. Both are free, and both seem to work very well.

I also use ZoneAlarm, Spybot Search & Destroy and Prevx, and my PC's been incident-free since I got it a couple of years ago, despite my occasional forays into some pretty sketchy websites.
 
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BPSCG said:
Whoops. Saw the thread title and thought it had something to do with obtaining footwear suitable for getting into an ass-kicking contest.

Never mind. Carry on.

ETA: Regarding AV software, I can't decide which I like better, AVG or AntiVir. So I have them both loaded on my machine, update the virus definition files nightly, have one do scans every night, the other once a week, and I have one (I forget which) load its memory-resident module. Both are free, and both seem to work very well.

I also use ZoneAlarm, Spybot Search & Destroy and Prevx, and my PC's been incident-free since I got it a couple of years ago, despite my occasional forays into some pretty sketchy websites.
Click to expand...
If you'd stay off those mud-wrestling latex-wearing-nun sites you wouldn't need all that AV & Spyware stuff.

Or you could just switch to Linux & stop filling Billy's wallet!
 

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Apollyon said:
2) Don't know. Never used AV software in 13 years of PC computing. It causes more problems than it solves, ime. The best AV software, imo, is your brain and resisting clicking on offers to increase your manhood or see 16 year-old latino girls ride ponies. :)
Click to expand...

I'm assuming you must be on a limited home network. With a large network and many routes to the internet you have to protect yourself against worms and other attacks that don't require you to click on anything. Plus, you have to deal with 150 experts whose brother's friend's roomate's tailor's son is a computer expert and said to do this and that to your computer, undoing the IT's department preventive measures and violating company policies in the process. AV programs are not the end-all preventative, but a necessary tool that has it's place on many machines right beside the firewalls, policies, monitoring, and maintainence that should be the base, not the bulk, of network security.

I do agree that the bulk of network security is education on what or what not to click on.

By the way, I only spend an hour or two a week dealing with network security issues. It's invisible to the end user for the most part and doesn't require much maintainence once set up, inlcuding the AV software. 99% of what I deal with in that hour or two involves laptop users who took their laptops home and hooked them up to their home networks and did something to disable the measures that were already there.
 
Doubt said:
Both will be XP. If I had a "real" install disk for XP, there would be no issue. But I cannot just reinstall windows on the current hard drive without wipeing out what is there now. And I would prefer not to re-install every damn bit of software I use again. This way I can keep my data and programs intact for now and get a fresh start going on the other drive.
Click to expand...

You said you had two drives. Save all your data to the second drive, reinstall Windows XP Home on your first drive, reinstall your software, and then restore your saved data. I know you don't want to reinstall every damn bit of software, but it's probably easier, more stable, and will be better in the long run than dual booting. Otherwise, if when you dual boot, you boot to your "old" Windows, and it's working, then why do you want a "new" Windows? If the "old" Windows is corrupt, then there is no reason to keep it. You won't be able to run your old programs on the "new" Windows anyway without reinstalling them since there won't be any registry entries for them on the "new" Windows so why is reinstallation a problem?

NOT that this is your situation, but the only time I've seen this be a problem is when someone had an illegal or hacked copy of a program that they know they can't re-install.
 
Starthinker said:
You said you had two drives. Save all your data to the second drive, reinstall Windows XP Home on your first drive, reinstall your software, and then restore your saved data. I know you don't want to reinstall every damn bit of software, but it's probably easier, more stable, and will be better in the long run than dual booting. Otherwise, if when you dual boot, you boot to your "old" Windows, and it's working, then why do you want a "new" Windows? If the "old" Windows is corrupt, then there is no reason to keep it. You won't be able to run your old programs on the "new" Windows anyway without reinstalling them since there won't be any registry entries for them on the "new" Windows so why is reinstallation a problem?

NOT that this is your situation, but the only time I've seen this be a problem is when someone had an illegal or hacked copy of a program that they know they can't re-install.
Click to expand...

Nope, it is legit copy. Just that the computer did not come with a "real" XP disk.

The only problem with the old install is the admin account is corrupt. Everything else is fine. But I cannot alter my anti-virus settings or install Civ IV. I like the way the old drive is set up, but since I only have restore disks, I just cannot repair the damage without starting over. For now I want to keep the old installation around.

The tinkering will start this weekend. Probably will just pull the current main drive for starters and "restore" onto the other one. Then mess with the boot.ini before reconnecting the current main drive.

All files from both drives are backed up on an external drive as of last night.
 
Doubt said:
3.) Is Open Office any good? Comparable to MS Office 2003? (Starting to hate Microsquish too.)
Click to expand...

I know this isn't the bulk of your question, but I'd like to throw in my 2 cents on Open Office.

First, the bad:
  • Open Office opens very slow. They've fixed this somewhat through a systray app that preloads a bunch of stuff. Now much of the wait time has moved up front to every time you boot.
  • Compatibility with MS Office apps is available, but isn't that great since MS has chosen not to open its proprietary file format for all to see.
  • OO has nothing even close to Outlook/Exchange.

Open Office did get me through the last couple years of a university education. I had to produce a couple hundred pages of documentation spread over about 8 different documents for the year-long software engineering portion of my CS degree. The standards for the documentation were fairly high (the usual stuff: must have detailed and correct table of contents and figures, etc.). I also had to prepare a number of presentations with slides. And for those general education courses: term papers with bibliography and footnotes.

Last summer I interned at LLNL and had to produce more slide shows, spread sheet analyses and a research symposium poster. All of them done with OO. I was particularly happy with the symposium poster. We were advised to use Powerpoint to create our poster, but everyone had Linux boxes. I found Impress (the OO Powerpoint application) to be suprisingly capable of producing a large high quality scientific research poster. The print shop of course did not have OO installed, so I simply used OO's built in PDF export. The results were excellent.

The only real sticking issue I still have with OO is interoperability with MS Office. EVERYBODY has MS Office, and most places expect to receive documents in .doc format. For a plain memo or something OO will convert to doc fine, but try anything sophisticated and the results are a mess.
 
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