Another Opinion Among Many

If you remember, I  mentioned a hard drive replacement a while ago.  I haven’t tried to revive it yet with a tool like Spinright yet, but I may still be able to get something out of it.  That was a hard drive failure.  It doesn’t boot or recognize at all at the moment.

I thought that I was going through that with another one as well.  The hard drive in Frankenputer seemed to have gone on me after another update of Hardy Heron.  I had split the drive up into three partitions, one as the root partition “/”, swap, and a third one as “/home”.  The root partition was formatted as EXT3 and the /home was partitioned as ReiserFS.  After yet another update (development software after all), I rebooted into a corrupted first partition and E2FSCK didn’t help, dropping me to a single user recovery shell.  I ran FSCK manually and was able to get the partition reorganized.  I carried on but this was not the end of my troubles.

One more update killed it for good, I thought.  My drive was not even recognized on boot.  Its the second hard drive and I actually have GRUB, my bootloader on the first drive.  I’ve been letting whichever operating system that does the latest update handle GRUB, which meant that the config file with the instructions for GRUB “/boot/grub/menu.list”, was on the second drive on the corrupted partition.  no problem, I just popped in a Linux install CD (Ubuntu of some version, I recall), and chose the option to boot from the first hard drive to get into Arch Linux o that I could do some online digging about this problem.

Somehow, the corruption of the first partition seemed to have affected the boot sector of the second drive as well, which was causing the problem with the BIOS picking up the drive.  I was able to “see” and mount the “/home” partition, so I figured that the drive just couldn’t be dead, as I had thought.  I immediately attempted to back up as much data as I could access onto DVD, which was quite successful, albeit a tad slow, as the OS and the DVD burner were on the same IDE cable.  On a lark, I reformatted the first partition with ReiserFS, which in my opinion, has a far superior recovery on unexpected shutdown.  Suddenly, the whole drive was once again visible to the BIOS.

I reinstalled Gutsy Gibbon and used my existing “/home” and restored my user and each of the kids.  The only difference was that a few programs were missing, which  can be recovered, and some theme-related files which were in “/usr/share” were not available.

So, the take away from this story is that your hard drive may not actually be bad.  It might just be that your hardware is not perfectly suited to go together and a file system corruption may be the cause of your troubles.

Awesome! I just got my e-flyer from Dell today and I saw a new offering on the ad.  They’re now bringing the Ubuntu operating system to Canada on some of their models! This is great news, as I have been contemplating a laptop purchase and it was going to have Linux on it.  Now, since I like Ubuntu anyways, I won’t have to install it myself.  And all of the machine’s capabilities will be used under Linux, supported by Dell.  Woo hoo!

Check it out:  HERE

Its been reported here and here as well.

This is so good!

My Internet Security Suite.

I’ve tried this recently and it does actually work. Thanks to Ed Labonte’s mention of this trick in his podcast The Linux Install Podcast. If you have a computer that has become unresponsive, you can make it reboot if you have to without hitting the power switch by doing the following:

Hold down the “ALT” key and the “Print Screen|SysReq” key. Then, type, ensuring that you definitely type the right letters distinctly. The letters you type, while still holding down those two keys, is “R” “E” “I” “S” “U” “B”. This should give your system back to you.

Good luck with that.

It looks like the Windows machine has died for good.  I was trying to swap over files from my Debian install to the Windows machine so that I could wipe my drive and replace Debian with Ubuntu.  About 1/2 way through the file transfer (over 100mbps ethernet, which is never any where near that, ever), the Windows machine unexpectedly rebooted.  It stopped at the spot where Windows would begin to load, complaining about an unrecoverable error and that I was to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL.  This did not help.

Under the Recovery Console, which I go to by insterting my Windows CD and booting from it, I did a CHKDSK and it also complained about an unrecoverable error.  A DIR request yeilded  no directory but a complaint about an unrecoverable error.

Without any other recourse, I am going to try and reinstall Windows.  So far, after it prechecked the “not quick” install, the installation has been stuck at 39% for the last 45 minutes.  So, its trying to do a bad block check and work around those, I guess.  Its not doing it very quickly, though.

I guess that I’ll have to admit it and work out getting another drive installed.  The DiamondMax 8 that is in there  is the same drive that’s installed in the workstations at work, and our IT guy has replaced most of them already.  Its just time, I guess.  Time to play Taps.

I’ve been having difficulty when installing the newest releases of some Linux distributions (okay, all of them).  What’s going on is that my ATI Radeon 9550 AGP seemed to have lost some important support.  Nobody seems to have addressed the issue properly and I do see that others were having the same problems that I had.  For no apparent reason, the screen would lock up hard.  It was as if there was a problem similar to what was happening years ago with my old ASUS P3B-F board, which I had to fix with some solder and a capacitor - not the usual fix.

I found that rolling back to an earlier version of x.org (the graphical interface for many Unix and Unix-like systems) fixed my problem.  So, I’ve been using Debian Etch (the stable branch) since.  I’ve had to add some back port repositories and search around for some software to compile from source so that I can have late enough versions of some things.  This has worked out alright for the time being.  But, I’m a software adventurer at heart, and I like to try what’s new.

Enter NVidia.  I’ve been watching for a decent deal on an NVidia graphics card for some time, as they actually produce drivers for Linux for all of their recent cards (all but a few really really old ones, actually, and the x.org drivers will work for them).  That time came this weekend.  For $10 and my ATI card, I have n NVidia GeForce 6600.  This card is actually quite a bit newer than the ATI card (by more than a year), so it’ll give me a bit more mileage as well.

So, the first thing that I did was to enable the right driver for it under dear old Debian, which worked well (I think that I used Automatix, or did I? Good beer).  The next thing that I did was to try OpenSUSE 10.3 to see how it worked with the card.  Wow!  No lockups! I have that distro on a separate hard drive, so I may throw it back in soon and try it for a tad longer to review it.

The next thing that i did was to back up a bunch of files that I had on the 16G drive that held PCLinuxOS and wipe it in favor of Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.  That seemed to work alright, booting me into a screen with the “nv” driver, which has no 3D acceleration but did boot me into 1024×768 at 85Hz, which is ideal for most CRT 17″ monitors like mine.  I enabled the restricted modules and got the proprietary driver for my card.  This caused my screen to go all wacky and I had to use the NVidia settings manager to set the card to the proper refresh rate.  Really, who uses 56Mhz? There seems to be something wrong with my user settings, though, as I cannot keep the settings.  I have to “zap” to the right refresh (which is easy, using CTRL+ALT+”+”), which is not ideal.  I’ll figure that out.  I created an account for each of the kids which do have the correct refresh rate.  I think that I’ll create myself another login and delete the original.  Maybe that’s the best idea.

I’m having a hard time getting used to KDE again.

I did learn something, though.  It seems that, like with SUSE, Debian now enables software suspend by default.  How did I find out this tidbit on my Desktop machine, you ask? It seems that I couldn’t boot back into Debian after installing Kubuntu, as it was looking for the suspend image on the swap partition on the Kubuntu (formerly PCLinuxOS) drive, which wasn’t there.  After logging into the Kubuntu desktop and searching around the internet, I found an obscure post on somne message board advising to try starting with the “noresume” switch on.  That meant adding the word “noresume” to the Kernel line in the GRUB boot list.  These incidents are why I became a champion of GRUB a long time before it was considered mainstream.  LILO is a thing of the past for me, and this problem is one of the biggest reasons.  I got booted into Debian to post this article as a result.  I messed with the /etc/fstab file to point to the proper swap partition, so that I can use the ones from both drives again.  We’ll see if I can reboot.

After trying to save my Windows XP installation as it was, I decided that its just ttoo hard on the head to figure out what’s wrong, since I don’t have all the problems layed out to me in a nice little /etc directory that I can edit with my text editor (going to learn vi some day, too).  I’m sure that its as simple as that if you know where to look, but Windows makes it far too cryptic to really figure out what’s going on inside your computer.  So, I’ll do what their own techs would have recommended as a fix after soaking me for several hundred dollars on my credit card over the phone with someone who’s command of my own language would be limited and their command of Windows XP even more limited.  I’m wiping the whole drive and reinstalling Windows.  Lets see if this will fix the issues.