The Eye of Kris

My desktop computer refuses to boot today. I suspect that a hard drive has failed, but I can't tell for sure until I get an alternate boot device. I don't feel like replacing the drive and re-installing an OS just to test it, so I'm going to use a copy of Knoppix to see if the drive is readable.

Knoppix, for those that don't know, is a version of Linux that runs right off a CD. There's no installation, and it doesn't make any changes to your computer - you just set your computer to boot to the CD ROM drive, put the disk in, and start it up. Then you can use the Linux operating system to do a number of things, including analyzing your hard drive to see if it's working properly or not.

The only problem is that I can't seem to find my copy of Knoppix, and I don't want to spend two hours downloading it (it's free, but it's large so it takes a while to download). I know I have an image of it on my desktop at work, so I'll probably just put this off until tomorrow evening and bring home a CD or DVD from there.

Obviously, I can still get on-line. I have several computers in the house, and most of my critical stuff is backed up on a server with redundant hard drives in it, but my desktop has all my necessary programs installed and configured just the way I like it. Hopefully, I won't have to re-build it and re-install everything (although I've thought of doing that anyway, just to clean it up a little).

Honestly, I'd love to switch to using Linux permanently, but there are still a few critical programs that I haven't found comparable replacements for outside the Windows world. Plus, I don't know if Mary would like using Linux, so I'd probably have to keep Windows on her machine anyway. I'm still more familiar and comfortable using Windows as a desktop platform, but I think that is mainly because I don't use Linux that way very much - most of my experience with Linux is using it as a server only. I'm pretty sure I would get comfortable with it after a while, though.

Hopefully, tomorrow evening, I'll get my computer running again.