A newbie's progress continued

Hello, it's me again. I'm sure many of you are like the cat who ate a chunk of cheese and then lay down by the mousehole - waiting with baited breath.

I tried bringing up the laptop again using the SLAX Linux live CD, and as I mentioned before, it almost recognized the portable hard drive. Then, for some reason, I had the idea of turning off the portable hard drive and turning it back on, and voila! SLAX recognized it.

The problem was that it recognized 4 different parbreastions on the hard drive, as opposed to the 1 that Windows had, and none of the parbreastions seemed to have any relation to what we laughingly refer to as reality.

First, though, I tried Fluxbox on the system (as a kind soul on this group recommended) instead of the standard xstart, and I was pretty happy with the response. Being a little lighter-weight than KDE, it had its advantages, especially for a system that wasn't going to be doing any heavy-duty game playing.

Second, I copied the files on the portable hard drive onto a different system, and proceeded to wipe the parbreastion table on the portable drive. I then set a single parbreastion for the portable drive and made it copied the contents back on.

The files are now connected, and now the next task is to figure out how to get the wireless network going. Again, I would like to thank all of you for your patience with me, and for the helpful suggestions I have received. This is exactly the kind of atbreastude that I was hoping to encounter - advising without spoon-feeding, and without the contemptuous treatment of someone expecting to be spoon-fed.

I shall continue regaling you with my progress until someone threatens tar and feathers, or until I get this system completed. Meanwhile, thank you all again for your indulgence!

John Gardner