Now for the main reason I set this blog up in the first place.
I have a vpr matrix laptop, model 200a5. I have to send it in for repair, the DVD/CDRW drive crapped out. Before this, I had to send it in for a video problem, no display. I know it worked, because it would boot and I could see it on my home network. When I got it back, the display worked, but it no longer booted into Linux. It hung looking for, or setting up PCI/pcmcia services. I was able to disable the pcmcia setup, and it would boot and work normally, but when I ran the pcmcia startup script, it would hang. I decided to try to re-install the Windows XP Home edition that came witht the computer. It is a recovery disk, but it hangs after trying to switch to the graphics mode section of the setup. I even tried installing Windows 2000 Pro, but it hangs at "Setup is starting windows 2000" prompt. I noticed that the motherboard replacement from this last repair included an updated BIOS dated 10/11/02. (It's a Phoenix BIOS with Best Buy BIOS Version BM1 Q0F0B) If I disable the PNP, I get an error on booting stating that IRQ cannot be assigned to the PCI Serial Bus. (Warning IRQ not configured - PCI Serial Bus Controller on Motherboard Bus:00, Device:0C, Function:00)
Incidentally, since the DVD/CDRW drive was not working, I used Microsoft Windows 2000 RIS (Remote Installation Service) to boot via PXE and install Windows 2000. If you need to install 3rd party network or other drivers, you need to make a directory "$oem$" at the same level as the i386 directory. In that directory you can have various sub-directories for network adapter, modem, video, etc. Copy the .inf and .sys files from your driver into the appropriate directory and then edit the "ristndrd.sif" file in the "i386" directory, adding, or changing the following to [Unattended] section:

OemPreinstall = yes
OemPnPDriversPatch = "Drivers\network adapter;Drivers\modem;Drivers\video"

Of course, modify the correct pathnames to your driver.

The other thing I learned was that the F12 key does not work for the network bootup process. You need to press Fn+F12 in order for the PXE client to boot from the network.

OK Back to the repair. I am backing up my linux partition. I am using bzipped tar file.
tar -X exlude.filename -cjf /mnt/fat32/vprmatrix.tgz /

The exlude file included /mnt and /proc (although I didn't do the proc the first time.)
I suppose It ought to be named tbz or tar.bz since I used bzip instead of gzip, so I will rename the archive file to reflect that when it's done.

It took about 20 minutes to back up 2.5GB.