Another Opinion Among Many

So, I’ve been trying to settle in after my PATA drive decided that its job was finished. I thought that a new drive would be a great place to put a new version of Ubuntu. So, instead of going with Version 8.04 LTS, I loaded up version 9.04. As an aside, the numbering scheme coincides with the date of release (8th year, 4th month=April 2008).

I decided to install with the newer, and to some, buggier, EXT4 filesystem. That proved to be an interesting, and frustrating, mistake. I figured that I’d load up Warzone 2100 for Caleb to play at, which, so far, has locked up the screen on every version that we’ve installed. I figured,that with a new version of everything, perhaps this was the time.

It was not. Caleb could only reset the PC with the button, as he didn’t know the “reisub” trick. I’ve been teaching him a few of the more advanced tricks to using a PC so that he can gracefully shut down his PC, even if locked, though, so he will get this, if need be.

The filesystem pooched. I was able to get back into action with a quick fsck from the recovery prompt, but this is an action that only the root user can do, so Caleb and Abby would be SOL to fix a problem like this.  This went on for a few too many hard resets and some of the data on the hard drive became corrupted. One of them is my podcast downloader, PenguinTv. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it and that didn’t work because the filesystem had decided to drop to “read only”, which screwed everything else.

What resulted was a screwed up system in which I couldn’t upgrade any of my packages and programs, as apt decided that it couldn’t get past the failed/screwed up PenguinTv reinstall.

So, I made the decision to reinstall Ubuntu 9.04 on the drive again, but with the EXT3 filesystem for the root partition. I left the /home partition as it was, with EXT4 (by the way, EXT4 is BLAZINGLY FAST – noticibly to the nth), as I became addicted instantly to the speed. Due to some bad package decisions (Warzone 2100) and a few other screwups that I shouldn’t be doing after all the Linux experience that I have, I ended up trying this again.

Here’s where the fun really began. Although I explicitly told the installer NOT to format the /home partition, /home got reformatted anyways. So, all of the data that I had collected over the last 2 weeks had been erased. My bad.  Thankfully, I had restored most of the data from my failing drive by pluging it in long enough to transfer what I could to the new one. This is the advantage of having your data files on their own partition. The bad blocks on the old drive were on the partition holding the operating system, but not on the /home partition where the user data was, so I could mount just that partition and grab what I needed.

So, I had to restore the old data once again. Before I did that, though, I decided that enough was enough with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope version 9.04 and I upgraded the whole thing to the Alpha 5 of Ubuntu Karmic Koala, version 9.10, due out in October 2009. There were some really cool things that I noticed with Karmic, like the S.M.A.R.T. tool that popped up a nice graphical interface that informed me that the PATA drive had failed an integrity check and needed to be replaced. No other OS that I know of has done that by default. There were some refinements over Jaunty that I liked, as well (the themes are getting richer and more chocolaty, as well (yes, I am one of the few that will publically claim that I LIKE the brown themes).

The problem is, though, that sound doesn’t seem to want to wok as it should. When watching a video file on YouTube is choppy as all get out. Watching a movie file of any kind, such as Big Buck Bunny, would result in choppy, horrible sound that skipped.  Then, this morning, I tried to boot and the GUI did not show. The X-server took over, as usual, but did not go beyond a black screen.

I’ve installed Jaunty over it and am considering my options. I’m becoming quite disgusted with the state of distributions that use Apt as a package manager. When it works, it works great, but when it screws up, it can screw up royally.  Perhaps, if I can wresle the computer away from the kids long enough to fix it, I may ditch Ubuntu for Arch or Slackware.  They seemed to be easier to work with than others. But, Fedora 12 will be out in a few months. Perhaps RPM and Presto will woo me. I’m liking the delta merging idea a lot. Who likes to download 100s of MB of files to do a small update?

Wow. So much for the short rant.

A relative approached me about helping to repair their computer. They have an old IBM Netvista. It had just stopped booting up, and the way that they described the problem to me over the phone, it sounded like the CPU may have died.

When they brought it over, though, it actually was booting to the BIOS screen, but crapping out after when it tried to start the operating system.  This machine had an originally installed copy of Microsoft Windows XP Home edition. The license key was on a sticker on the computer case, which is completely normal.

After a bit of research, I found that others had this same problem, and it had been something that might go wrong with some versions of this model. The solution was to reinstall Windows and claim your machine back. So, I sourced out a copy of Windows XP Home Edition, as I don’t run Windows on my computer at all. A friend lent me his XP Home CD and I proceeded to install the operating system.

I chose a “repair”, as I wanted to try and save the data on the hard drive, since my relatives are perfectly normal and don’t have backups (I bet they’ll make one this time).

As usual, the installation took over an hour to do, but it went without much of a hitch. I got to the screen where Microsoft wants you to enter the license key for your purchased product and it wouldn’t accept the valid key on the computer sticker. This made me angry. Why would they not accept a paid for license key? Continue reading ‘What good is that license key?’ »

I got a motherboard and processor from my brother that would be a great upgrade to my old P-III. I quickly secured a cheap stick of RAM and hooked everything up. The problem is that I couldn’t seem to get anything to install on the drives. It was always coming up with errors, causing a total failure. So, I bought a replacement motherboard, thinking that I might be having problems with the IDE connectors. I really wanted to use the board my bro gave me, though, as it had better capabilities.

I had the same issues with the new board, although the operating systems that were currently on the hard drives in the machine recognized the board and booted. I still received compression errors and files weren’t saving properly. Even after installing brand new IDE cables (the pretty round ones that glow under UV light), I still had these issues.

Programs that are memory intensive, like Firefox (yes, it is, all you naysayers – its the browser that I use, and likely a lot longer than you have, but its still got leaks), would crash for no apparent reason. Many games would just refuse to load. I began to suspect something else (which I should have checked before spending money).

It turns out that the cheap used memory module was priced so low for a reason. Its crap (to quote Fab from Linux Outlaws). A quick memory test with memtest86 indicated that there were errors on 5 of the tests in the thousands. Its a guarantee that I will have better luck with a good memory stick.

So, remember, if you’re getting I/O errors, check your memory first, as its pretty much the cheapest fix, and a likely suspect.

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!