Linux rescues Windows

[Asheville Joe]

The other night, Windows committed the unconscionable act of crashing my 
TV program while I was in the middle of watching Dr. Strangelove.  
Needless to say, I was inspired!  I made a Windows boot diskette and 
formatted my C: drive.  BUT, this time, instead of taking four days to 
reinstall, I booted back into Linux using a Linux boot diskette, ran 
lilo, and proceeded to restore the C: drve using the partimage backup I 
had made.

If you subtract all the time I took making sure I was doing it right, 
the whole process took about 25 minutes!  That's a bit of a time 
savings!  (I was restoring 2.7GB on a 3.4GB partition and zeroing out 
unused blocks from a backup on my second hard drive.)  And it worked 
great!  Everything was just like before (only it works!)

I have been trying to get something like this to work since I got this 
computer over six years ago and (with all your help) I finally did it!
My only problem now is that the backup I have is not very good.  Windows 
was already pretty unstable by the time I made it.

Now, since this process is so fast - about 1 hour to backup and 1/2 an 
hour to restore,  I'm thinking of starting a reinstall of Windows.  I 
can take my time and do it over as long a period as necessary (not just 
four long days straight) because all I have to do is back it up and put 
the unstable version back in for anything I need to get done in the mean 
time.

All of this is made possible by having Linux on my system!

Of course, I do as much as possible in Linux to begin with and hope 
someday to do without Windows entirely, but for now, the (proven) 
ability to make a "clean" Windows install and just revert back to it 
whenever it gets flakey is a godsend!

Joe

-- 
"The only safe vaccine is a vaccine that is never used." --Dr. James A. Shannon, National Institutes of Health