Ok, so reinstalling my whole PC hasn’t been an awful lot of fun. And thanks to iTunes for kicking me while I’m down, by deleting the music that was on my iPod that it could’ve just synced back into the library. That’s my freshly-bought Iron Man soundtrack up the spout. Think I’ll just buy the CD next time Steve.

However, doing a clean install of Windows and Ubuntu has been an interesting experience. It has to be said, that out of the two Ubuntu wins hands down. It was faster for a start. But more importantly it was also a heck of a lot smarter at detecting my hardware. On booting into my freshly installed Windows system I had no network card and no sound. Fortunately I had the Asus driver CD, so I was able to get them up and running, but the missing network connection was a heart-stop moment.

Contrast this with Ubuntu, which auto-detected all my hardware smoothly. Getting it online was a breeze. And as a plus, Hardy also now correctly uses my router as a DNS server. Previous Linux installations have always needed the direct IP addresses for the DNS servers supplied by my ISP. The only real glitch was in the NVidia driver, which wasn’t properly setup. But that was quickly fixed by installing the newer package from synaptic, and then running the command prompted by the Nvidia config utility.

However, the really fun thing was a result of XP service pack 3. Of course, with a newly-minted Windows install I got my anti-virus and firewall reinstalled and then hit Windows Update. The first thing it got me to install was SP3. I’d heard dodgy things, so wasn’t too happy, but what can you do?

However, a real fun factor of SP3, is that it breaks the ability to install MS software, and use Windows update. Installing separate things like iTunes was a breeze, but Windows Live Messenger, or all those critical IE fixes just wouldn’t install.

A quick websearch through up this forum post.

Essentially you can fix it by copy-and-pasting the following into a command prompt:

regsvr32 wups2.dll

Its easily fixed. But still, that’s a hell of a bug to leave in there. Crippling Windows Update also makes me wonder how exactly they’re planning on rolling out the fix…

Well, I had a fairly major IT disaster last night.

I’d decided that I wanted to move away from booting multiple Linux distros. There’s a reasonable maintanance overhead, and with me only wanting to install them to see what they’re like, it really makes more sense to use virtualisation, especially since that’s something else I’ve been meaning to take a look at.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, I do like my eye candy. And there’s no doubt that SuSE and Mandriva’s grub menus are a lot nicer to look at than Ubuntu’s plain old ncurses one.

So I did some digging, and found out how to setup gfxmenu on Ubuntu, and proceeded to switch over.

Big mistake. I don’t know quite what it did, but the NTFS filestructure on my PC’s windows drive (the boot device for the PC) was irretrievably corrupted. I noticed Ubuntu was having problems reading it, and when I tried to reboot, it just wasn’t happening. After digging around, it became clear that the NTFS file structure on the drive had been completely hosed, and the only thing to do was a complete reformat.

So, I’m now rebuilding my Windows installation piece-by-piece, while trying not to think too hard about what files I’ve lost. Fortunately I bought a 500Gb external drive over Christmas, so I’ve not lost as much as I might’ve, but I’ve still probably lost most of my save games (especially any recent ones), and anything in my iTunes from that last few months (some purchases, and a few audiobooks I’ve ripped).

Once I’ve got the basics of the Windows system sorted out, I’ll plugin the external drive and see what I do and don’t have, but at the moment its just gutting.

So take heed people. NCurses is pretty enough. And backup regularly.

As a side-note, I also completely wiped and reinstalled Ubuntu, not wishing to risk having a dodgy grub installation repeat the mistake. That gave me a few oddities that didn’t happen when I was upgrading to Hardy rather than clean installing, so I’ll have to remember to post about that experience.