Re: Instructions for installing Slackware

[Janina Sajka <janina@afb.net>]

dThe Ghost software, which I think has a different name as a Symantec
consumer product, writes a sector by sector image of your hard drive, or
the partition you select, to a file. You get to name the file and specify
where it is written--but that must be somewhere other than the partition
you're taking the image of. Think of it like taking a picture, because
that's pretty accurate.

This is a good and smart thing to do because, if you get into serious
trouble and lose all of your data through some mistake you make, you can
turn the process around and recreate your working partition from the image
file. It works very very well. It takes me about 45 minutes to create the
image, and about 15 minutes to restore a computer from an image file. I've
done this both ways many many times.

PS: You can download a demo copy of this program from the Symantec web
site--at least these were available last I looked some months ago. The
demos were fully functional but timed out after 30 days.

You will need to repartition your drive, but you shouldn't do that until
you've baked your system up properly, first. You will not be putting your
Slackware on the same partition as DOS or Windows, but you can certainly
choose which to boot into, and you can even launch Linux after booting
into DOS if you prefer.

				Janina Sajka, Director
				Information Systems Research & Development
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

janina@afb.net


On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Leslie Fairall wrote:

> Hi Janina:
> 
> I'm not real familiar with this ghost thing. Can you explain how it
> works? By the way, I have Windows 95b on my hd, but my computer boots up
> in dos, if this is helpful information. My drives are already petioned,
> but on the dos side, I think. Guess I'll have to repetion it again?
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Janina Sajka wrote:
> 
> > Hi, Leslie:
> > 
> > Your concerns are well founded, but they needn't prevent you from moving
> > forward.
> > 
> > The most important thing is to make sure you have a good backup before you
> > start deploying a second OS on your HD. Idealy, this should be a backup of
> > the partition you want to protect, rather than the entire HD. This way,
> > you can restore, if need be, to a particular partition--which may even be
> > of a different size--without losing something else where on the hd. I use
> > Ghost for this--and I think it's now available as a consumer product from
> > Symantec.
> > 
> > PS: Ghost works very very well for this--but you also need to have
> > something like a Jaz drive that will hold a large file -- mine now
> > approach 1 Gb -- in one image file.
> > 
> > 2.) You will need to decide on a good partitioning scheme for your hd and
> > repartition the system. On the Windows side, a product like Power Quest's
> > Partition Magic is accessible and very easy to use. Most importantly, it's
> > reliable. I trust it so much I used it to resize a FAT partition on a
> > notebook, while using battery power just the other day.
> > 
> > 3.) Once you've accomplished these two tasks, you can install and
> > reinstall without threatening your working partitions. You won't even need
> > a boot manager, necessarily, to do this.
> > 
> > 
> > 				Janina Sajka, Director
> > 				Information Systems Research & Development
> > 				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
> > 
> > janina@afb.net
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Leslie Fairall wrote:
> > 
> > > I am looking for instructions for installing Slackware. I'm not sure which
> > > version, because I received it in September. I have a sighted friend who
> > > is willing to help, but since I've never done this before, I am paranoid
> > > about messing up my computer. The things I need to do after I install it are:
> > > 
> > > 1. Figure out when to install brltty
> > > 2. instructions for setting up a PPP connection
> > > 3. instructions for setting up realaudio.
> > > 4. be able to set up a dual boot between dos and linux.
> > > 
> > > Any suggestions whatsoever would be very appreciated. Thanks.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > ***** **************************************************
> > > "Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It's 
> > > just very particular about who it makes friends with."
> > > 
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ***** **************************************************
> "Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It's 
> just very particular about who it makes friends with."
> 
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