boot problems

New member looking for help; wife downloaded the UPS virus and her XP froze, would not boot; ok I learned about the alt-F10 option to reinstall windows, but she wanted to save all her pictures; so I learned about the netbook remix, prepared a sandisk 4gb stick to boot, using ubuntu tool, and downloaded the 9.10 (I think) remix, copied to stick and voila! it booted into demo and I was able to save all her pictures; did not want to install right away; few days later booted into demo and used gparted to shrink the win partition by about 4GB, thought I would do install later. But since then have been totally unable to boot into the remix, trying all options, changing some options etc.. So later I tried to boot from windows, using WUBI, but after a while got a message it could not find or load the install file. So I tried downloading the iso file again and copying to stick; no luck; tried on another laptop, same result. I am stumped, looking for help. Thanks and aloha.

 

Answering my own question. Apparently there is a difference between copying an image file to flash stick and burning it there; anyway, I went back in vista and reformated the stick, used the windows tool from the ubuntu webiste, then burned the image to it and now it works fine.

Wish I knew the technical difference.

 

Think of the disk as a file cabinet, each partition on the disk as a file drawer, and the individual file folders in each drawer as files in a partition. In one case you're copying individual files, in the other you're cloning the whole file cabinet. Cloning the whole file cabinet is like burning an image file to the flash stick.