Nasty Windows XP

Today I had the displeasure of re-installing WindowsXP-Pro on my main system. This system has 4 HD's so I keep a copy around for a couple of programs I can't do without (DVDFab5 & Sony Vegas). It took me ALL DAY to get windows installed because of my SATA HD's.  Windows SP3 won't recognize my nVidia Nforce4 SATA controller. Somewhere in the process I messed up the drive and ended up downloading WD's DataLifeguard CD ISO. Using that I was able to prepare the drive and install Windows again. At one point, I thought I had killed the drive. To test it out, I formated ot ext3 and Ubuntu installed with no problems. Only crappy windows couldn't work. What's worse was I even tried Vista and it too was a no go. Well, thanks to the WD tools I got it all sorted out, but it ruined my Sunday.

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Permissions problem after fresh install

I recently did a clean install of Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 and got all my updates.  All was perfect except somehow my permissions in my home folder got borked.  Well, not really somehow! I figured out how I screwed it all up. I was trying to restore all my saved email (thunderbird) and in doing so (by saving to an NTFS partition) all the settings in my backup files required root permissions.  Well I got all that sorted out but I also messed up the permissions to some hidden files too.  Long story short, it all seems to be working now, but I should have archived the files in a tar.gz file rather than copying them to the NTFS partition. Achariving would have preserved the permissions. In my blinde efforts to fix the problem, I reset permissions on everything in the home folder. It's all working now, but I'm sure some things aren't quite the way they should be. I was going to start from scratch again, but it's not worth it since everything seems to be working well now.

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