Dem Ol' Computer Blues or How We Missed Two Issues of AlternativeApproaches.com

by Christine Hall

Oops!

It all began on Christmas day when we received a gift of the boxed set of Mandrake Linus 9.0. As many of you may know, we're big supporters of the Open Source as an alternative approach for computer users. In fact, three or four years ago we trashed our copy of MS Office in favor of the then open source office suite StarOffice, and have been using OpenOffice since a stable version was released about a year ago.

For two years we've been studying the various distributions of Linux to determine which would suit us best, deciding on Mandrake's version because it unabashedly focuses on the desktop. Also, everything we read led us to believe that Mandrake was easiest to install in a dual boot situation, which would allow us to continue running Windows until we feel comfortable with Linux and find Linux replacements for all of the applications that we regularly use.

Unfortunately, our install did not go as smoothly as we expected.

Mandrake's install program, we had read, comes with a very good and easy to use tool to partition the hard drive. But when we tried to use it, it refused to partition our disk. The problem, it turned out, was that we have been using Norton SystemWorks and then Ontrack's FixIt utilities to defragment our hard drive, and they spread files throughout the entire disk, and we had ended-up with some of Microsoft's infamous “unmovable” files near the end of the disk.

To make a long story short, we took the advice we got from Mandrake's very capable technical support team and spent fifty bucks on a disk partitioning tool. Unfortunately, something went wrong with the partitioning (we had an OS crash in the middle of the partitioning process) and we ended-up with a DOS partition that was approximately 15gb in length. Also unfortunately, none of our numerous utilities was able to fix the problem.

So we bit the bullet, saved all of our data (well, we forgot to save some) to the hard drive of another computer on our network, reformated the hard drive and started from scratch. The good news is that our main computer now boots into both Linux and Windows, and that we have a “clean install” of Windows, which is something that we needed anyway. The bad news is that it's taken us nearly two weeks to get all of our applications loaded, and in our haste we failed to save some very important data.

For example: we were going to devote the entire first January issue to Lynne McTaggart's excellent new book The Field. The fine folks at Harper Collins had supplied us with a stand alone column excerpted from the books, and five copies of the book to give away in a contest. But we lost the article, as well as all emails to our contact with Harper Collins, and we've been unable to contact her. So an issue that we were very excited about now appears as if it'll never happen.

But here we are, back in all of our glory. And we do hope that you appreciate this issue.