Paul A. Luzzi

July 6, 2008

Original post from July 2 was removed, and recreated today.   Also setup option that I don’t allow anonymous comments anymore.  Im tired of dealing with the spammers. So here’s the original July 2 posting :
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Going absolutely crazy lately, trying to boot knoppix on my daily driver, athlonxp workstation. Its running XP, SP1, and works great for most things. Its got a ton of stuff on it, so I need to preserve it all.  Problem is, few years back when I installed it, I setup the C:\ drive as FAT32 to allow me to do repairs if needed. At that time, I had gone through a lot of repairs using Knoppix to boot and fix issues – and NTFS write-ability wasn’t yet present. So the safe bet was FAT32. However, I need to upgrade to SP2 on this box, so that I can load AVG8.0 but there isn’t enough free space on the drive. And I cant compress, because its FAT32, not NTFS and that feature isn’t present in FAT32. So before I do the FAT32->NTFS conversion, I want to have a backup copy of the C:\ partition – otherwise I risk losing everything.

Long story short, after MANY MANY repeated attempts at booting knoppix, it just kept hanging on the “looking for Knoppix on /dev/hdc” line, and never progressed. Older releases (like 3.2) would fail with the message about cant find filesystem – but newer ones (like 5.3.1) just hang on the /dev/hdc line. I tried DSL, Puppy, Knoppix, and others – and all did the same thing. I tried booting USB, but my BIOS doesnt support it. I tried command line parameters in all combinations of : nodma, noagp, noapic, nolapic, acpi=off, pci=bios, pnpbios=off, all-generic-ide, irqpoll, vga, and others. None of them worked. What
finally got me booted, was unplugging my second DVD writer. I have 2 of them in this machine. Im not using cable select, and have master/slave jumper-ed properly, but it just wouldn’t work with both drives. So unplugged one, booted from the other, backed up my drive, and am finally moving on …

So after doing all that, many posts online recommended defrag before convert.   So I went to do my defrag, and found that I didnt have enough free space – I had 7% free, but it wants 15% free. Then the cleanup began, on a drive that I had already cleaned up as much as I could. Biggest gains were by moving the “c:\windows\driver cache”, “c:\windows\help”, c:\windows\system32\dllcache” folders over to a hold area, and running the info found here and here, notably the “sfc /PURGECACHE” and “sfc /CACHESIZE=10” to limit to 10Mb going forward (instead of 300Mb+). That gave me enough room (more than 15% – actually 19%) to run my defrag, and then the convert (convert.exe c: /fs:ntfs). The defrag took about an hour, the convert about 10 minutes. All good at that point.

Then was able to successfully upgrade to SP2, add AVG8, and get the bb client tuned appropriately. So finally, I can do web browsing, file downloads, and safe Internet work again.