not sleeping can be dangerous for your laptop

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1 Nov 2009 10:37:23 EST

In a spurt of productivity, last night when I got home I decided that instead of sleeping, I was finally going to pave my laptop and install Windows 7. There's just one problem. My laptop is a netbook, and has no DVD drive. And after a couple hours of messing with a USB Key, I learned I can't get it to boot from a USB Key. It's probably the key, although it works fine on my desktop, but I got frustrated and decided to just install 7 from inside XP. Now I'm going to fast forward a bit and just tell you where I'm at now, not how I got there.

I am quad booting a netbook, by accident

Windows 7
Windows XP
Ubuntu 9.10
LiveCD of Backtrack 4 Pre-Release

Yes, it is a LiveCD, not an install, it reverts everytime I restart, and only take up a gig of space. It's a pretty novel idea, but it wasn't at all what I wanted. And on top of that, I still have two big blocks of unpartitioned space that I can't combine or move around.

And the worst part of this is that nothing works right. I can't get Windows 7 to let NetworkStumbler or Wireshark use my wireless connection, I can't get Ubuntu or Backtrack to even see my wireless connection, they certainly don't enable the touchscreen (although 7 does). The only operating system that actually works completely is the old one - XP. I can't move the partitions around. Frankly, I don't even know where or how Ubuntu installed itself! It seriously does not have it's own partition -according to what I can see, I think it installed itself inside of a disk container sitting on the ntfs filesystem of my XP partition and is coexisting somehow but that is madness! And most frustratingly I can't repave the machine cause I can't get it to boot from an outside source! I may try and use linux to overwrite the partition table and install a bootloader with images of the install dvds sitting in random spots of the hard drive, but that seems very careless and frought with peril.

On the other hand - I really really really really want someone to confiscate my netbook and try doing forensics on it cause I would laugh for a long time when they image it and start trying to figure out just what the heck is going on!

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