New Project (or fdisk said, "Oops")

With Monday off, I figured I'd catch up on computer work -- photo, video editing, some code, etc. Just 2 hours ago, I added to my list rebuilding Claire's laptop from the ground up.

I was trying to get Windows to see the free spots on the hard drive, but it was having trouble, so I successfully moved the entire Linux filesystem to hda7, booted it, all that. Then I went removing and recreating partitions. It seems I can't just remove hda7 and recreate hda3 in the exact same location and expect to actually be able to still use it with its new name. That's a disappointment, so now I'm installing Debian again via Knoppix 3.3. I'm getting to be a real pro at this.

I have it all put back together now for the most part. Since Claire only uses the machine as a x-terminal to run a remote session on butterfly, I haven't really needed to restore any of the old files on it.

I installed Windows XP on it, which rendered Linux unbootable as usual. I booted the Knoppix CD, mounted the on-disk FS, chrooted a shell into that filesystem, but lilo kept telling me permission denied. It turns out the Knoppix LiveCD mounts other filesystems with nosuid, and nodev, so I remounted it with suid and dev, and lilo worked again, and I could restore the boot record properly. Along the way, I also started using Knoppix 3.6 for this restoration.