It's been a long 24 hours. Last night I was playing around with my laptop, trying to upgrade my RedHat 7.1 to 7.2. I ran the install four times, I think, and it either bombed in the middle or I got errors on boot of missing components. That's bad enough, but I don't have any data worth keeping on the Linux side. But when I discovered that I could no longer boot into Windows 2000, that started to inspire fear.

The Linux install is now working great — turns out the CDs I was using were defective in some way. But I'm still struggling to even get into Win2K. Whatever happened also seems to have hosed the password database, because I can't log in as the administrator. So now I'm working to mount my ntfs partition in Linux, but the technology might not quite be there yet.

Two resolutions: 1) never use ntfs, always use fat32 for future Win2K installs; and 2) backup backup backup!