[Cialug] Dying commputer question

[murraymckee at wellsfargo.com]

Something bad has happened to my home computer.  OK, it's still windows
XP, sorry about that.  

I'm assuming that it has a virus or other malware of some sort.  It
keeps randomly shutting down saying something about a software bug.  My
power supply died just after Christmas, and that fried my mother board.
The troubles started after I got the computer back.  At first it would
shut down after a few days of running.  Then it would shut down after a
few hours of running.

Yesterday I had to reinstall office due to a corrupted file.  Last night
my anti virus software wouldn't load due to a missing DLL.  I can't dial
into the ISP.  I can't run MS Word.  Even if I do absolutely nothing but
stare at the screen there are times when it won't stay up for 3 minutes.
When it won't stay up a few minutes and you can't start any application
software, it's time to do something.

So, here's my plan to 'recover' as best I can.  I'm not at a point where
I can devote a lot of time to the project, and I don't know enough about
Linux to feel comfortable making the jump right now, but this is what
I'm thinking.

Get a second disk drive, at least big enough to hold all the data on the
C: drive.  I'm leaning toward an internal drive, but would consider a
USB drive.  C: is a 200G drive, sometime since Christmas I noticed that
there were about 150G of space used and 50G available.

Boot the computer from a Linux / Ubuntu Live CD.  That ought to be
pretty much immune to catching a virus.  I have a live CD I tried to
load on an older computer at Christmas time, but 128M of memory doesn't
seem to be enough to install it.

Copy all the data from C: to D:.  I'm not sure if I should try and copy
the whole drive or only the 'useful data' parts.  I'm leaning toward the
whole thing to make sure I don't miss something. 

Mark the new drive as not a boot drive.  Is it possible to mark a hard
drive as read only?

Nuke the C: drive by reformatting it to get rid of any problems.

Reinstall XP and applications.  I'm not planning on copying any software
from D; to C:.  If I don't have a disk to load I'll download it from the
internet.  Copy any relevant data from D: back to C:.

This time I am going to figure out how to do the multiple accounts thing
so I can have an admin account to do the installs and user accounts for
general day to day use that can't install anything.

After a few months, once I'm sure I have all my data of the new drive,
I'm thinking about reformatting the new drive and installing Linux
there, making a dual boot system.

OK, have I missed anything, other than a few hours of time and the cost
of a new drive?

Thanks,

Murray McKee 
Operating Systems Engineer
WFFIS - Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems 
800 Walnut Street
MAC F4030-037
Des Moines, IA 50309-3605
WORK (515)557-6127 Cell (515) 890-9660  FAX (515) 557-6046
MurrayMcKee at WellsFargo.com 
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