Outsmarting Murphy

Published on February 16, 2008 By MasonM In Blogging

For the past several weeks I have been testing a Linux distribution, PCLinuxOS, on my laptop. It's a pretty good distro, well designed and stable, but still not as fast as the one I normally use, Slackware. Today I decided to go ahead and put Slackware back on the laptop. It's been my primary operating system for years and I felt that I had pretty well put PCLinuxOS through it's paces.

Right after I had reformatted the drive partitions and was about to start installing the OS the cdrom decided that would be a great time to give up the ghost. Damn! It really wasn't too much of a surprise, the cdrom had been acting up for a while now and I knew it was just a matter of time before it quit for good. The timing really sucked though. As the laptop no longer had an operating system I was stuck with a rather expensive paper weight.

Ok then. Plan B.

Using my desktop machine I created a bootable usb flash drive containing the Slackware installer application and the files needed to boot and run the laptop as well as to get the network card up and running. I then copied the installation source files to a directory on my desktop machine and set it up as a network file server so I could access and use those files from the installer program running off the flash drive.

I then booted the latop from the usb flash drive and started the installer with the NFS source option. It worked like a charm and twenty minutes later I had the Slackware OS installed and running on the laptop once again. Whew!

Murphy tried his best on this one but I still managed to outsmart the bastard. I don't know if I'll buy another cdrom for this laptop. I've been thinking about getting a new laptop anyway. Maybe it's about time I started seriously considering it.

Comments

Texas Wahine

on Feb 16, 2008

I'm impressed. I didn't understand half of that, but it sounds pretty ingenious to me.

MasonM

on Feb 16, 2008

I'm impressed. I didn't understand half of that, but it sounds pretty ingenious to me.

Thanks. It probably sounds more impressive than it actually is. Just a round about way to get the job done. There's always more than one way to skin a moose.

Bunnahabhain

on Feb 17, 2008

Ahh, Murphy - if anything can go wrong, it will. My favourite is: if you work on something long enough to improve it, it will break.

You may want to consider buying a cheap replacement drive on eBay. I've had good luck buying accessories for a Thinkpad on eBay. IIRC, you have a Dell, so YMMV.

That way you have a few more options - sell the old laptop and use the money towards a new one (it should be worth more if it is perfect working order), give it to a family member, or keep it as a backup. The price/performance of laptops really seems to have improved in the last year or so. You can probably get a lot more for your money this time around. I bought my first non-IBM this year, an HP DV9000 series. All I can say is, wow!

Of course you can save even more money if you want Linux (as I'm pretty sure that you do), but as no doubt you already know, you'll have to do some extra research to get one without a Microsoft pre-install. Good Luck!

MasonM

on Feb 17, 2008

Thanks, but I never sell my old equipment. I keep them around for the odd job or spare parts. I have several laptop cdroms laying around but naturally none of them will fit the bay on this Dell

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