Starting Fresh: Day 1

The first official step towards this, in my opinion, huge undertaking is backing up the entire hard drive onto my brand-spanking-new 1 terabyte Western Digital My Book. The backup itself only took around an hour and a half to copy all 83 gigs of data. I simply booted up to my Ubuntu LiveCD, mounted the backup drive, and used the cp bash command to copy everything over. Afterwards, I ran the diff command to compare the backup and original just to make sure everything was copied correctly. There was only one mistake I had to correct manually, which was a file missing from the backup that was originally named with a tilde (~). Apparently, that character messes up copying or something.

The reason I copied everything from Ubuntu and didnt just use the Windows Backup utility is because I wanted EVERYTHING, not just my data, so that if I mess anything up, I can just clear off the hard drive, copy everything back onto it, and pretend the whole thing never happened. This admittedly costs a lot more space, but if youre like me, you dont want to have to reinstall and reconfigure everything if you screw up, with the only consolation of your backup being you didnt lose any of your personal documents.

The next step is to create a Windows XP Home Edition installation CD. I found some scattered guides on the internet that touch on how to do it, but Im thinking its going to be shoot-and-miss for a while. Ill detail the process I took on my next post.