I celebrated the weekend with my tradiditonal fucking-up of my computer, followed by the requisite fixing of said computer. Today's effort was to move my debian testing installation to the beginning of the hard drive, after removing the Vista that came with it. Removing Vista was easy enough (delete partition!) and then came the moving my linux around. I copied the contents of my /home onto an external with an ext4 partition, which I would later learn to be less easy than the ever-compatable ext2. In the debian install CD's menu system, I partitioned the hard disk: Removed the NTFS partition, copied the root partition to the beginning of the drive, and then deleted it. Made swap, made home partition. When that was done, I booted and copied the contents of my external back to /home, only to find out that 'cp -a' doesn't bring along dot-files. So, there went my settings. All in all, it wasn't nearly as opaque or complicated ans dealing with Windows has been.