Hi Larry, thanks for all the help! I am not wedded to Linux-Puppy so any experience with these and any preference as an install?

Xubuntu, Lubuntu,VectorLinux,Dream Linux

No experience with any of those, not able at the moment to do any experimenting. I should have my set backup and running again in about a week.

I have heard good about all of them. Give them a try, the nice thing about linux is all the different flavors to pick from.

hi

since you seem open to other distros.....we can see the size of your hard drive....but can you post the specs of your RAM and do you use wired (ethernet) or wireless to connect to the net?......if wirelesss name your device please.

There a number of live cds....you could try but with a 4.7 G drive I would think tinier and less bloatware is the way to go.

Therefore avoid.....bloatware desktop environments like kde and gnome.....avoid larger software sets like openoffice and choose abiword and gnumeric
and since I am giving advice you are free to ignore....I suggest you look at LXDE and run it on tinycore?

Tinycore is a 11 Meg download but likely to give you issues if you have wireless.....it runs in RAM and you download what extensions you need.
The extensions have the "chaff" removed so man pages are low on detail.

Tinycore is a live cd and install cd. Other bigger live cds that might interest include Mepis and Linuxmint.

Here is my 2G ram system running with most applications available at boot, but I could have some placed "ondemand" if RAM was short

cat /proc/meminfo (with culling)

check out www.distrowatch.com if interested

Aus9, thanks for getting back to me, getting back to you regarding rebuilding Grub, I am under some time constraints with my focus on school, do you have an opinion on rebuilding the MBR through a Windows disk and the fixmbr command, from there I can start installing Linux again.

hi

well there a more than thing to suggest.

1) Do you know if you have a recovery partition?

2) Do you prefer ms to control your bootloading or linux or use a combination...such as ms for hard drive....cd or usb for linux

The reason for that suggestion is that ms ....has a deliberate policy....of not recognising non-ms partitions and likes to always be in control.

3) Generally its agreed that you install ms first and linux second.....and generally....ignoring above issues....let grub be in MBR...which is the fastest way.

When ms decides to overwrite your mbr....redo a live cd and re-install grub back into mbr.

YMMV