Someone28624
Big Geek
Background: My parents have an oldish Dell desktop. It has Win XP It's been running very, very, very slowly lately. The thing is loaded with viruses and malware. I update their antivirus software and clean things up everytime I visit. But I just am not there often enough to keep up with things, and the computer is sliggish, slow, and freezes incessantly. While they've been using Win XP, the computer also has "Breezy Badger" Ubuntu and Mandrake 10.2 on partitions from my earlier experiments with Linux.
I decided to convince them to try Gutsy Gibbon after reading a ton about how great it is. My goal was to merge the Mandrake and Badger partitions and put Gutsy Gibbon on there. I, of course, backed up everything on the computer before messing with any of this.
However, this is where things go downhill. The Gutsy Gibbon CD I made doesn't seem to work. It freezes up almost as soon as I boot from it, and the screen goes fuzzy. So I decided to boot from the Badger CD I had to at least merge the Mandrake and Ubuntu partition.
Through some course of action, however, I succeeded in merging the Windows and Mandrake portion, and creating a large amount of free space. I formated that free space to EXT3 and installed Badger on there again. So now I have Badger on there twice- one that boots, one that won't- a GRUB boot loader, and no other OS's.
Well, since I totally screwed things up, good thing I backed up, right? Well, here's where my story gets even sadder and more pathetic. I used Nero for the backups, and now all the files are filename.jpg.nco. And I can't open them. Googling shows me this is a Nero format, and it seems I just need to uncompress them, right? How can I do this (preferably from Breezy Badger, as that seems to be the choice OS at the moment)?
And how do I go about getting rid of my useless partition that won't boot, upgrading to Gutsy Gibbon, and maybe even getting a NAFTS partition on there for our good friend Windows?
And now that I think about it, I never checked that I have a Windows CD around. *sigh* As luck would have it, it's probably lost.
In other words, I'd appreciate any help I can get here.
I decided to convince them to try Gutsy Gibbon after reading a ton about how great it is. My goal was to merge the Mandrake and Badger partitions and put Gutsy Gibbon on there. I, of course, backed up everything on the computer before messing with any of this.
However, this is where things go downhill. The Gutsy Gibbon CD I made doesn't seem to work. It freezes up almost as soon as I boot from it, and the screen goes fuzzy. So I decided to boot from the Badger CD I had to at least merge the Mandrake and Ubuntu partition.
Through some course of action, however, I succeeded in merging the Windows and Mandrake portion, and creating a large amount of free space. I formated that free space to EXT3 and installed Badger on there again. So now I have Badger on there twice- one that boots, one that won't- a GRUB boot loader, and no other OS's.
Well, since I totally screwed things up, good thing I backed up, right? Well, here's where my story gets even sadder and more pathetic. I used Nero for the backups, and now all the files are filename.jpg.nco. And I can't open them. Googling shows me this is a Nero format, and it seems I just need to uncompress them, right? How can I do this (preferably from Breezy Badger, as that seems to be the choice OS at the moment)?
And how do I go about getting rid of my useless partition that won't boot, upgrading to Gutsy Gibbon, and maybe even getting a NAFTS partition on there for our good friend Windows?
And now that I think about it, I never checked that I have a Windows CD around. *sigh* As luck would have it, it's probably lost.
In other words, I'd appreciate any help I can get here.
