Kubunting - Notes & Categories

1. Notes:
how to do a forced shutdown; what's the equivalent of scandisk/chkdsk; do any versions of Linux run windows applications (e.g. Word & Excel?)
2. Let's see if I can get a tagger working...<br />
<br />
{Application Setup}<br />
{Desktop Configuration}<br />
{Networking}<br />
{O/S Basics}<br />
{System Maintenance}<br />
{Ubuntu Forums}
{Notes}

Kubuntu Queries 2

{System Maintenance}
I have had misadventures in discovering how to sequence the reinstallation of XP and Kubuntu, and would like to develop an efficient method for backing up and restoring both, including backup and restore of the GRUB bootloader.

At present I use the XP CD to reformat the drive, then reinstall XP, then use the Kubuntu CD to reinstall Kubuntu and the bootloader. However, I have noted that the bootloader is corrupted/wiped out whenever I do an XP repair, so I'd like to have way of restoring that independently of doing the Kubuntu installation.

Having read the "HOWTO: Restore GRUB (if your MBR is messed up)" thread and a few others, I am still looking for a way to back-up the bootloader. I am still working out the conceptual differences between and MBR bootloader and a root directory bootloader, and guess that a root bootloader would be easier to backup and restore. But I think my current installation uses an MBR option. So there's that to deal with in addition...
Suggestions?

{System Maintenance}
During one of my attempts to read the windows partition via kubuntu, I created a mount point that doesn't do anything, but which I cannot delete. I suspect that I created it via the Disk and Filesystems utility when I failed to replace <mount point> with something else in one of the options fields.

Now it shows up every time I visit the home directory. How do I ret rid of it?


* Note: there is an additional question about setting permissions so that I can make changes to files on the Windows partition. But I haven't gotten to that yet...

{Ubuntu Forums}
Is there a way of searching for an exact phrase? "phrase strings" and phrase+strings don't do anything other than return results of the individual words. So when I want to search on "backup GRUB" it returns all results for 'backup' and 'GRUB', which makes the trawling task much longer.