[Cialug] Rookie installer having trouble

[murraymckee at wellsfargo.com]

I had really hoped to get further before I had to ask for help, but I didn't get that far.

Here's the situation.

I have two Windows XP laptops that I'd like to set up to dual boot to Linux and XP.  My wife doesn't want to learn something other than Picasa right now.  Once I get my laptop converted I'll do my wife's laptop.  The plan is to use XP & Picasa when not connected to the internet and Linux, Firefox, Thunderbird when connecting to the internet.

They have 40G hard drives.  Mine is nearly full, the other one has some space.  

I bought a pair of 64G USB drives.  One to use as backup.  I copied the 17G of data from my computer to one of the USB drives.  I've also copied it to a USB external hard drive as well.  Two backups is better than one.

I bought a pair of 256G Crucial MX100 SSD to replace the hard drives.  I bought a Sabrent USB3 to SATA/IDE connector.  (I think USB-DSC8 is the model or part number)

Here's what I did last Saturday afternoon at church where I can access WIFI.  Out in the country we have dialup for personal e-mail.  Well, I guess it was 2 Saturdays ago now.

I downloaded TUXBOOT & ? to do the drive copy from the hard drive to the USB.  (I tried to use EZ GIG IV but it didn't support the Sabrent connector.)  I can't find the down load of the copy code on my laptop, so I must have downloaded it directly to the USB, and it's wiped out now.

I rebooted to TUX and copied from the hard drive to the SSD, or so I thought.  It ran for 45 minutes and failed.  I deleted some stuff, ran defrag, and tried again.  It failed again.  After several hours of work, finding what to use instead of what I thought I was going to use, downloading and installing it, and finally running it and failing twice, I gave up and went home.  It was well past supper time already.

So, this afternoon I set the laptop back up here at home.  I'm using my work laptop for this e-mail as it has a cell modem.  I connected the SSD through Sabrent connector and looked at my two USB drives.  One contained my backup data as expected and had a capacity of 61G, 17G used.  

I looked at the other one, expecting to see the TUXBOOT & ?, but found a copy of my "C" drive, and no tuxboot to be seen.  What surprised me even more that the USB drive was formatted to 40G and completely full.  I now guess that the USB is allocated in 4K blocks and the hard drive is allocated in something smaller and that caused the backup error.  Although both are NTFS file systems.

What concerns me is that I can NOT see the SSD, even though there are two lights on the block at the other end of the cable from the USB connector that plugs into the laptop.  One appears to be indicating that there is a USB connection, and the other is labeled SATA.  I'm assuming that means that the block is talking to the SATA SSD drive.

Since Windows can't see the SSD drive I'm guessing that TUXBOOT & ? can't either and I inadvertently selected the USB when I started the copy.  I didn't connect the SSD drive to the laptop until after I'd shut it down in preparation to boot TUXBOOT from the USB drive.

I really wanted to make two or maybe three partitions on the SSD, one for XP and one for Linux, and possibly one for common data where both could read and write, well, one at a time, whichever one was booted at the time.  But if I use the same thing I used last weekend I'll end up with the same problem again.  Even if I figure out how to see the SSD, I'll get it formatted down to 40G and lose the other 200G of space and have no room to install Linux.

So, the two questions I have for the computer wizards out there are:

1. Has anybody used a Sabrent USB-DSC8 to connect to an external SSD, and how do I get the computer to recognize the SSD drive?

2. How do I copy Windows to the Curcial SSD without formatting it down to 40G so I have room for Linux and data expansion?  Or should I install Linux on the new SSD first and then copy the XP system in?

Or am I going about this all wrong and I need to start over farther back.

Years ago I had a 200G hard drive on my home desktop computer, when that was huge, and it became flaky.  I bought a 1T drive to replace it and copied the entire drive over using the software that came with the new drive.  Now I can only access 200G on my 1T drive.  At the time it didn't worry me as I was more concerned with the drive being flaky.  In the intervening years I've used up most of the 200G and I'd love to use more space on my desktop, but I can't get at it.  I don't want the same thing to happen to my SSD.  Losing 1/3 of my USB is a nuisance.  Losing 80% of my SSD is not acceptable, especially when I need more space now.

The other thing that happened was while I was trying to download TUXBOOT & ? I seem to have gotten way more than I wanted and every time I connect to the internet I get a constant stream of popup windows with advertising that I have to keep closing and then they open a browser window even though I said close.  I tried to uninstall some of it, but it seems to have deleted something that is required to uninstall software and I can't uninstall anything now.  Bummer!

I'm sorry about such a long rambling e-mail, but I thought with enough details there was a better chance of getting an answer than resolves the problem.

TIA,

Murray R. McKee

Operating Systems Analyst
Mainframe/Midrange Services

Wells Fargo Compute Platform Services  |  800 Walnut Street  |  Des Moines, IA 50309-3605
MAC N0001-037
Tel 515-557-6127 |  Cell 515-343-6630 |  Fax 515-557-6046 | Text pager: 5153436630 at vtext.com 

MurrayMcKee at WellsFargo.com

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