mrry

And now for a geeky one.

A couple of weeks ago (just as dissertation stress reached its peak), my desktop computer (ah, fair Compy) died abruptly. Well, perhaps not abruptly: it had been making an agonising, periodic scraping sound, and had frozen the night before. When I next switched it on, it made the same sound but worse, and rather compounded that fact by refusing to find the primary IDE master. I’ll bet you know what I’m going to say next: it refused to boot.

Ah, balls. I couldn’t find my copy of Windows XP (yeah, I know), so I couldn’t boot up to see if my years of photographs, e-mails and MP3s were okay. And the bus was leaving in half an hour. Double-balls.

Fortunately, after a previous irretrievable crash, I had taken the precaution of moving my “Documents and Settings folder” (/home/ to any Windows neophytes that might be reading) to another drive. And I had heard tell of Knoppix, a CD-bootable Linux distro that can be used to read data from a Windows partition. I burned a copy of it upon my return, and inserted it in my poorly PC. It booted, almost, but required a few tries (make sure to disconnect every extraneous peripheral from your computer when booting) to reach the window manager. When it did, I was dismayed to find that none of my drives appeared on the desktop, or in /etc/fstab. The malfunctioning drive continued with its death rattle, so I popped open the case, and disconnected its power supply. When I rebooted (smoothly, this time), the two partitions on my second drive appeared on the desktop, and I was able to read my old files again. (Knoppix is fabulous, by the way. It identified my video card and automatically configured itself for use on my home network. I was using the included Firefox and ssh’ing to my laptop in no time at all.)
I went out and bought an external hard drive so that I could store the contents of my 160Gb old drive and access them on my laptop. PC World had a 250Gb Seagate on special, so that did the trick. Right now I’m rsync’ing my MP3 collection onto the new drive.

However, a slight problem remains: over the years, I’ve also come to rely on certain Windows-only pieces of software, not least Microsoft Money, for which an adequate replacement on the Mac does not exist anymore (with the withdrawal of Quicken from the UK market). Hitherto I have been using my desktop mostly for these apps, but I don’t particularly want to reconfigure the desktop with Windows. Not least because it would require a new internal drive to replace the old, broken one. (Or I could wipe my data drive, but I’m too easily frightened to do that.)

My only apparent options for running these applications on my laptop (a white MacBook) appear to be Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop. I don’t want to repartition the meagre 100Gb drive on my laptop, so I went with Parallels. Not to mention that, for reasons soon to become apparent, I think OS virtualisation might be the way of the future. I found my old Windows disk and popped it in: soon I was installing Windows XP in a window on my Mac desktop. It actually worked! Hitting up Exposé and watching the moving installation progress bar tick along in the scooting-about window made me think that perhaps it is worth it to have such powerful computers these days.

So now I’m sitting using Firefox using Windows in Parallels on my Mac whilst Knoppix copies files to same Mac and both Windows and Knoppix access the Web through the Mac’s wifi. About this, I am certainly excited!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 12:28 am and is filed under Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.