…It’s more like my own failures, not the distro in particular ><
Anyway, here’s a quick recap: I’d installed Debian 3.1 ’sarge’ on my Toshiba Satellite Pro M10. It left me with a working Linux system but no GUI installed. I tried (unsuccessfully) to use tasksel to install the relevant packages for a desktop environment, but it seems there were problems with dependencies etc. because the package wasn’t available on the mirror I chose (Moral of story: When choosing mirrors, geographical location isn’t the most important; use primary mirrors instead of secondary mirrors. See the list of mirrors at http://www.debian.org/mirror/list).
In the end, I messed up big time and still couldn’t make GNOME start up. Feeling frustrated and giving up on my chances of success with Linux, I booted into Windows and deleted the partition with Linux on it.
Bad idea.
The GRUB loader (the one that selects which OS to start up) was linked to the Linux partition (sorry, I know it’s more complex, but I dont know how it really works), and it refused to work. Now I couldn’t even boot into Windows at all.
Strategies tried: Apparently one solution is to create a windows rescue disk, boot up the system from that disk and use the rescue terminal to fix it (using “fixmbr”). (will post the link later).
That didn’t work for me, however–I kept getting this error about some cable. I’m still not sure what was wrong with it.
I tried re-installing windows with the CDs that came with the laptop (not the windows installation disc), but i still couldn’t boot into windows after it was installed. I tried installing Ubuntu again, but the silly problem with power management was still there (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695 for a starting point and list of further links). So I was kinda stuck at a dead end.
