Daniel Pittman wrote:
On 8 Jul 2004, Bill Gladney wrote:I see all kinds of help files.....in here on this site.....but noticed there is not one piece of info on how to get this program off a computer...That isn't usually such a problem, so people don't document it much. :)
Bill, you clearly are not ready for this. I don't know how you stumbled onto installing Debian on your system, but if you think that an operating system is just a program, you *definately* aren't ready for Debian.
Slap that recovery cd back in. If that doesn't work, get your wallet out, send the laptop back, or take it to the local computer nerd and pay him to put windows back on.
Debian is great, but running it on a laptop is probably the most complicated possible way you could start, considering the horribly obfuscated hardware, undocumented chipsets, and general level of secrecy in this highly competitive area of computer manufacturing.
I would rebuild your system for $2000 and that would include full-blown Debian unstable with the X-Window system, sound, and all drivers, and also a new copy of Windows, and all updated drivers. Finally, I would install a small FreeDOS partition for legacy applications. It would take me about a month to do it, and I would have to spend every spare minute I'm not at work doing it. I have done this for a couple friends' laptops, and hence the outrageous quote.
Your best bet: hire a local computer nerd to set up your system like this: Reasonable Scheme for Laptop Partitioned Hard Drive: partition 1: FreeDOS - 200M contains the GRUB boot manager menu and files partition 2: Debian / Whatever: 10G - Some space to play around with partition 3: Swap partition: Make it 2x your RAM, maybe 500M maxpartition 4: Windows: (Rest of Drive) whatever version works best / came on you laptop
A clever geek can make windows write its swap file to the swap partition using some rather clever drivers out there. This is pretty cool and tends to reduce fragmentation on non-linux systems.