[plug] OFFTOPIC: Help with a Wizard PC

[Craig Ringer]

Cameron Patrick wrote:
> I disagree.  Moving the drive to another machine should work fine.  I've
> seen a few Win9x machines cope fine with motherboard + other vital
> component upgrades, so I don't see why this shouldn't walk with the
> Wizard.

Interesting. I've only ever had it fall apart, declaring that it can't 
find drivers for the PCI bus and somesuch. It generally wants to 
re-install the drivers (same drivers it was using before, mind you) off 
the CD-ROM again, but can't find the CD because it can't find the PCI 
bus...

I guess having a local copy of the windows CD on the HDD might help.

Anyway.... probably not the best forum for this discussion.

> Another possibility is to format the drive, put a basic DOS system on
> there along with a copy of the Windows CD and any extra drivers you
> need.  Then drop the drive in the Wizard and run setup.exe - I don't
> think it cares that it's not running from a /real/ CD.

Makes sense - you're quite right in that it doesn't care at all if it's 
running off a CD or not. I hadn't thought of that approach.

 > It strikes me as amusing that people here seem to think that nstalling
 > Debian on a wizard is much less painful than installing Windows.  Not
 > that I disagree :-)

It is somewhat funny now that I think about it. As it happens, I was 
cheating and using a pre-installed disk image, but the point stands. I 
find it easier because Linux seems much less inclined to break when you 
change the hardware out from under it - this is largely due to the 
drivers mostly being shipped with the kernel and installed by default, I 
think.

Craig Ringer