putting Linux on an old windows PC Post: 302535096

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers putting Linux on an old windows PC Post 302535096 by Patriots12 on Wednesday 29th of June 2011 05:56:36 PM

06-29-2011

Registered User

putting Linux on an old windows PC

Hello, I was just reading around these forums when I had an idea, without being able to really answer my question for myself due to some circumstances, so hopefully someone can give me a hand. I have an old desktop PC that has served me very well. I got an Asus G73JH though, so I mostly used the desktop for downloading random crap that might have viruses and what not. However, the desktop succumbed to a virus that was a keylogger and deleted my file association registry (I think?) so everytime I try to open something, I have to right click, run as... administrator. I tried running my windows XP boot disc, but for whatever reason when I try to boot from CD it either says drive does not exist or there is no OS found. I played around in the BIOS some, but it didn't help. I tried formatting and booting from a USB stick but again it said there was no OS found on the USB sick. So it's been sitting there gathering dust for about a month now, and today I had the idea of wiping it and installing a UNIX OS. So my question is, how would I go about doing this? Do I install a UNIX OS to my USB stick and then boot from that, wiping all the data off? Do I need to free up some hardrive space and make a new partition? I apologize for the length of the post, I just wanted to add some details for my circumstances so I didn't get a "this has been asked 23239048 times, just search the forums" PC specs (that I can remember offhand) 1GB RAM 160GB HDD 3.2GHz CPU (I think?) currently running windows XP Thanks!

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

mic-image-writer

MIC-IMAGE-WRITER(1)					      General Commands Manual					       MIC-IMAGE-WRITER(1)

NAME

       mic-image-writer - Write a live image to a USB stick

SYNOPSIS

       mic-image-writer [options] [image file]

DESCRIPTION

       mic-image-writer is a simple yet very helpful tool, it can help you write a live image to a USB stick, it is safer than dd and has a good
       progress indicator, it has two work modes, console and GUI, you can explicitly use -c | --console and -g | --gui to force it to enter
       console or gui mode, by default, it will smartly decide this automatically.

       It just writes an image to the whole USB stick, so the original data on your USB stick will be overwritten, mic-image-manager has a more
       powerful GUI tool for this case, it can write a live image to a specified partition, the old data on that partition will keep intact.

OPTIONS

       -h, --help     show this help message

       -c, --console  Run in console mode

       -g, --gui      Run in GUI mode

EXAMPLES

       Write a Molib live image to your USB disk:

       mic-image-writer your-2.1-final.img

EXIT STATUS

       mic-image-convertor returns  a  zero  exist  status  if it succeeds, otherwise return non-zero and print error message.

AUTHOR

       Yi Yang, Anas Nashif, Jianfeng Ding

SEE ALSO

       mic-image-creator(1), mic-convertor(1), mic-chroot(1), mic-livecd-iso-to-disk(1), mic-image-manager(1)

perl v5.12.3							    2011-05-31						       MIC-IMAGE-WRITER(1)