(Yes, this is a re-post.)

This is strange. I just opened up my browser to look at a local html file and all my tabs loaded… RoadRunner’s been going on and off all day (mostly off). Must be doing something on their end. Though it seems to work currently (though for how long, who knows).

So the project of the last day or so has been converting an existing fat32 partition of mine to ext3. No big deal, right? Here’s what I did:

1. Booted up into Windows (yes, I left this on my computer when I switched to Debian; there’s really no reason to wipe it currently as it’s up-to-date and isn’t costing me anything, so therefore is semi-useful for testing purposes when it does get used, which is probably once a month or two).
2. Copied everything from the fat32 partition, which was about 30 gigs of data, onto the NTFS partition, which barely squeezed it all, and even then after uninstalling several gigs worth of games that hadn’t been played in ages (and actually are not even mine, they’re my brother’s). Took a hot shower while doing this, and read a fair bit out of The Joy Luck Club, in another room to escape the goddawful grinding noise.
3. Booted off a KNOPPIX 3.8 CD that I had made before 1).
4. Used QParted to reformat the ~100 gig fat32 partition, after unmounting it. KDE’s actually got some pretty nifty apps for this sort of stuff, though my wireless won’t work off a vanilla KNOPPIX CD. Remounted it writable (mount -t ext3 -w /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1). Copied the stuff back off the NTFS partition overnight, which probably took longer than before put was a heck of a lot quieter. Easier on the disk I’d imagine. Also remounted my Debian partition rw so I could fix /etc/fstab accordingly.
5. Marched in the local Memorial Day parade with the band.
6. Booted back up XP and deleted the backups. For some reason XP thinks the new ext3 partition is “unformatted,��? heh. Probably ’cause I didn’t make it from Windows.
7. Reboot, works fine.

Then, of course, I had to go through all the junk and make sure permissions were set correctly, etc. I like the new setup a lot better than the old one; though I now how to swap stuff to Windows on a floppy or CD if needed, the ext3 partition sure does work a lot better with Linux. One extremely visible effect is that thumbnails work correctly in Nautilus, i.e. they don’t take ages to load. And correct permissions. And lots more free inodes. And quick file-moving/copying, etc. I rarely have a need to switch data into Windows at any rate, and, unlike when I first switched over, I haven’t been afraid of doing stuff like manually mounting cdroms for a while now.

In other news, I’m probably going to be crazy sore tomorrow morning from the parade today. Gotta love out-of-season stuff like that. Though I have to admit, the baritones have it a lot worse than the mellophones do. Second worst!