Rejuvenating old hardware

I have an old Packard Bell Easynote One laptop I bought way back in 2002 (it wasn't even cutting edge then). When XP started slowing down under  the weight of windows services it ended up hidden, like so many other old machines, in the back of a cupboard. I think the last straw was trying to install iTunes.

I'm not one to be happy with perfectly good hardware going to waste so I eventually decided to get back into the world of Linux and install a lightweight distro to see if the laptop could be of some use. In this case I decided on Lubuntu.

On firing it up I discovered that the CD-ROM drive had died. This ruled out installing from a boot CD. Fortunately though I have an external USB CD-ROM so I decided to go down the route of setting up a dual booting system.

First step was to repartition the hard drive. This is a paltry 20GB. (Plenty of phones with more these days!) Bearing in mind the intention was not to use XP, I spent some time deleting data and uninstalling everything I could from XP. I got down to about 10GB, I'm sure I can do better...

After this I installed the free Partition Master Home Edition from EaseUS and used it to create a new Partition of 6GB. Some more partitioning would happen later.

Next step was to setup Grub. This is a boot manager that can be used to boot multiple operating systems.

1. Create a new C:\boot folder, copy initrd.gz and vmlinuz from the Lubuntu distro
2. Download Grub4Dos and copy grldr to C:\ and menu.1st to C:\boot\grub
3. Edit menu.lst and add the following to the bottom
   title Ubuntu Installer (hd0,1)
   kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz
   initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.gz
   Note hd0,1 refers to the second partition on the hard disk, i.e. Windows (The first partition is hidden)
4. Edit boot.ini (set  attrib -a -r -s -h c:\boot.ini first). Add C:\grldr="Start GRUB"
5. Put the distro CD into the USB CD-ROM and restart, select Start GRUB and follow the instructions to install

And here it is back in use.