Reinstalling Vista

Reindeer. Ben told me to say that.

Woke up at 6.35am, but strangely I did nae hear my alarm that should have gone off at 6.30am. Went to sleep again. Got up about 8am. Silly Sara was in the shower for age-cheese so I had to wait for age-cheese. My comp shut itself down last night while it should have been downloading lost, a power saving feature was set to put it in sleep mode after 1 hr. Annoying.

While I was waiting for Shaz matazz team to finish in the shower I started Azureus again, it had hardly downloaded any more of Lost although had finished partition magic. I installed partition magic, but it did nae work. I need to partition my hard drive so that I can install Linux and OSX. Vista comes with a built in partition manager, but this would only reduce the partition with Vista on to just under 600gb - more than half the drive space, and osx can't write to an NTFS partition.

I tried installing & using a defragging program to see if this would reduce the minimum partion size vista would use and it did - but only by a gig. So I copied across all the drivers etc I'd downloaded to a CF card and started to install vista again. Then I had to go to church.

At church it was meant to be a family and parade service but there was only 1 girls brigade member there and she was the only child. I had a coffee after the service and had to vladimir putin the chairs away.

At home I carried on with the vista installation, and created 4 partions - 97.6gb (100000MB) for Vista, 34.18gb (35000MB) for Kubuntu, 34.18gb (35000MB) for OSX, the rest of the drive (756.5gb) for shared files e.g. pics and music. I formatted the large partition as well. After installing vista again I had to install all the drivers. While the drivers were installing I kept going downstairs and doing a bit of washing up, then installing the next driver, then doing some washing up etc.

After installing all the drivers I took the main hd out of my old pc and unconnected my DVDRW drive in the new PC and plugged in the old HD so that I could copy across the Kubuntu install DVD ISO that I had downloaded on my old PC. I copied across the useful files & progs folder but Kubuntu wasn't on it, it must be on my old download HD drive. I couldn't copy the games folder across because my vista partition doesn't have enough space. The partition reserved for shared files was formatted as NTFS, and Vista won't let me reformat it as FAT32. I did some searching on to pinternet and I think pobasquish the best way to do it will be to boot from the win XP CD and reformat the drive from there. Hopeful-squish that will work.

I tried booting from the XP CD but it didn't recognise any HDs. So I rebooted into Vista, did some pinternet searching and downloaded the Intel RAID driver setup disk. Wrote this to a floppy (which took a while cos first it kept saying there was an error with the floppy). Rebooted and booted from the XP CD again. Got as far as the choosing what drive to install screen, but it only saw 1 partition, so I would've had to format and install Vista again!

Ate Tea, watched story makers and Secret Santa Lazytown episode off my new DVD with Ben.

I thought maybe the Kubuntu DVD includes something to format the partitions properly so I disconnected the XP HD and connected the Downloads HD (Had to guess which HD this was but I got it right). After this I downloaded Nero 7 so I could burn the Kubuntu ISO (Couldn't get Alcohol 120% to work). I tried booting the various different options of Kubuntu off the DVD but all of them (except the command line one) made the monitor switch off. I did some pinternet searching and found something about installing nvidia drivers from the command line that maybe would work. I tried going on the command line install option, but it doesn't recognise the RAID array.

Did some more pinternet searching and found that there's an Ubuntu alternate version that maybe would work, so I am now downloading that. Lost S03e20 is also only 58.7% done at the Ben-loves-Po-ment.

Food
Breakfast: Cookie Crisp, Jean Pierre Petit spongy thing with chocolate chips, strawberry jam toast sandwich, cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chilli con carne, rice, nachos. Pudding was trifle with tinned pear. Coffee.
Tea: Cheapo ham with Iceberg lettuce sandwich, Cheddar Cheese with Iceberg lettuce sandwich, Delee Co-Op shocolate chicken sponge cake with shocolate chicken buttercream stuff and shocolate chicken flavoured sauce and marbled shocolate chicken curls, 2 x deutsche biskuit, a bit of co-op fairtrade milk chocolate, a bit of green & blacks maya gold chocolate, cup o' tea.