During the last three days I have spent a few hours upgrading the kids computers, something I had promised them a long time ago. Poor MacK has been SO very patient! She has been struggling with an older PIII-1 GHz machine that was truly on its last leg. For months, almost weekly, she would come to me and ask: "When are you going to do my computer?" Finally, Thursday it was her day. She did not get a "new" computer; she inherited my 5-year-old 2 GHz AMD sytem with 2 Gb of RAM. I installed a 250Gb hard drive to replace the two smaller drives that were in the machine originally. As luck would have it, this older machine would not boot from a DVD — it is a limitation of the BIOS. So I tried to update the BIOS but could not find the correct updater for it. Fortunately I did not damage the BIOS in the process. I searched the Net for a solution and, of course, many people had faced a similar scenario. But, in order to boot the machine, I had to have a 4Gb or larger USB pen drive. We had to wait until Friday morning to get one from Wal-Mart (for the great price of $8). The SanDisk Cruiser device came with the annoying U3 software pre-installed, and I was unable to remove it for several days (more on that later).
Here is the page that guided me to the preparation of the USB pen to install Windows 7 on MacK's machine:
http://computersight.com/software/install-windows-seven-without-iso-dvd/I did a manual installation of Windows 7 allowing it to use half of the drive. The other half, of course, would be for GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 9.10). Everything went well and Windows recognized all the built-in hardware. It did not recognize an add-on NIC and modem, which I then removed from the machine since they were not needed anyway. After installing Office 2007, ClamWin, Firefox, and all the needed patches and service packs, I began the installation of Ubuntu. As expected, all went well. I allowed it to use the remainder of the drive.
I was very lucky because one of the big question marks I had was the wireless card. The existing wireless card (USB based from Linksys) is not supported under Windows 7 or Linux. About two years ago I had purchased five RALink (RT73) USB dongles from one of my favorite vendors (
3BTech) specifically because they were compatible with Windows and Linux. They had been sitting around in a bag unused and (mostly) untested. I had used one on my PC and one on an old laptop, and they had worked well. The dongle worked flawlessly under Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10. They were automatically recognized by both systems. Setting up the network connection was fairly easy and straight forward. Notably, the card works better under Linux than under Windows: better signal strength for extended periods of time.
The final step was to create a "Data" partition that would hold MacK's files so that they could be accessed from both Windows and Linux. I went into Windows 7 and shrank the C: drive to half its original size. I formatted it with the exFAT format, but that was not recognized by Linux, so I reformatted in Linux with straight FAT32. I then restored all her files and that was it. Friday ended with MacK's machine being done.
Saturday was the day for Noah's machine. I thought that, since it was identical to MacK's PC, I would get through it in no time. But that was not the case. For about an hour I could not get the machine to boot using the USB pen. I even re-did the installation steps on the pen thinking maybe something had gotten corrupted. Nothing. Regardless of which port I used the machine would not boot up. I re-checked all cables inside (thinking maybe something had gotten unplugged when I removed the old drives and installed the new 250 Gb disk). Everything was OK. After fighting with it (and using a few choice words) I went to the BIOS set-up one more time and reviewed every choice possible. And there it was! Somehow, "USB Legacy Support" had been set to Disabled. Once I enabled that setting, I was able to boot to the USB pen and repeated the process I had followed with MacK's PC. Saturday ended with Noah's machine being done. He had already backed-up his data, and he had unplugged his machine and then re-plugged it. That was great help!
About the U3 pre-installed software. On this Compaq Presario machine, I had to "eject" all the card reader and other USB drives before the U3 un-installation process would work. Once that was done, the complete process of having just a plain USB pen drive took almost no time. See these pages if you need more information on the U3 uninstallation process:
http://www.u3.com/support/default.aspx#CQ3http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2550/kw/U3%20Removal%20Tool/r_id/101834Today I will begin the process of converting my new machine (which was Tracey's new machine three years ago). My setup will be similar to the kids' (three partitions, etc.) with Windows 7 and GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 9.10). I intend to run mostly out of the Linux partition. So far, MacK is more into Windows (although she loves Linux) and Noah more into Linux. That does not surprise me. At least they will both be exposed to the two different operating systems and not be "boxed in" into one or the other.
