::sigh:: There must be some
::sigh:: There must be some variation of Newton’s Third Law which states that every convenience must be accompanied by an equally heavy inconvenience.
Why do I say this? Y’see, the installation of Linux Mandrake that I had used was known as “lnx4win”; rather than creating a new partition for the Linux image, it simply creates a file on the Windows partition that acts as a virtual disk image. Not as elegant (not to mention quite a bit slower) than a dedicated partition, but it’s quite a bit more convenient, especially for those of us who are only dabbling in Linux.
But if that image gets slightly fragmented or corrupted, it’s hosed. Not a good thing when you’re dealing with a file that’s around a gigabyte. Especially not a good thing on a system that hasn’t been defragged in about a year. (Why do I keep procrastinating on it? The same reason I keep procrastinating on nearly everything else in my life. In short, I have no idea why, I’m just a compulsive procrastinator, heh.)
Anyway, the point is, once I’d rebooted and run a few things in Windows, I loaded Linux up again and suddenly the drivers refused to cooperate. The video card and NIC drivers seemed to be the main culprits, but various other errors appeared (repeatedly) in the boot screens as well; I couldn’t get into the X GUI, and even running commands at the shell prompt produced numerous errors.
To make a long story short, after quite a bit of fiddling around, I’ve wiped the Linux image and will eventually (when I feel like it) reinstall, probably after a nice defrag and scandisk. Ah well, it looked good there for a second…
(And amusingly enough, amidst the loading of those corrupt video card and network card drivers, the system correctly identified the aforementioned Wacom tablet from the previous log entry. Hah. Guess there’s a silver lining to everything…)
