taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Tech: January 24th, besides being the date the first Apple Macintosh went on sale, is supposedly the day of maximal post-xmas misery. Well, it certainly was for me today.

I decided to power on my old desktop to set it up as a back-room fileserver, and twiddled the partition table accordingly to nuke a few unused Windows partitions and maximise usable space.

Somehow or other, some component of my system decided that it would henceforth be non-bootable. It seems some BIOSes don’t like partition tables where a high-numbered logical partition have a lower starting sector than a boot logical partition, or something… GRUB just errored out with an obscure ‘Error 17′, which apparently means that it couldn’t find its boot partition any more.

OK, so I needed a boot disk. But I had 1 laptop with a CD/DVD drive but no floppy drive, and a desktop with a floppy drive but no CD drive (due to hardware failure)… and the original linux boot floppy was long gone, seeing as I’d hardly booted this machine in the duration of two house moves. Argh.

A dinky little Cruzer mini 128MB USB flash drive saved the day. (R)ecovery (I)s (P)ossible is a tiny Linux distro that fits into 27MB, well inside the USB drive’s limits; it has an exceptionally helpful and detailed README detailing exactly what needs to be done to create a bootable USB flash drive from its ISO image, using just the generic linux toolchain.

Together with fdisk and parted’s ‘rescue a lost partition’ mode, I was able to get the mangled partition table back into shape, mount the boot disk, change the fstab and grub configuration file, and reboot into a working system. phew!

Many thanks to Kent Robotti, who’s done a great job with RIP.

On the other hard — no thanks to whoever came up with the arcane rules behind the IDE partition table… argh.

Tags: boot, day, desktop, disk, drive, grub, linux, partition, table, tech, usb

Hardware: So IBM Thinkpads come with a predesktop area — a hidden 4GB partition of recovery files, Windows XP install disks, windows drivers, etc. taking up space on the hard disk.

I haven’t used Windows much at all on this machine, given that I don’t use Windows when I can avoid it, but I did pay several hundred dollars for it – since it’s now impossible once again to buy an IBM laptop without doing so (or without paying quite a lot extra). So I want to keep it around, and I want to make sure I can reinstall if things go wrong.

Having a hidden partition just isn’t quite safe enough for me — because I’ve had hard disks go belly-up before, or scribble on the partition table, or so on — these things happen. Thankfully it’s easy enough to get CD-ROMs shipped from IBM support if you ask nicely, so I did so yesterday afternoon at about 3pm.

This morning at 9am, there was a knock at the door, and I received a package shipped from Durham, NC containing the reinstall CDs.

It’s great dealing with professional hardware companies again ;)

Tags: area, disk, hardware, ibm, partition, predesktop, recovery, reinstall, space, thinkpads, windows

Linux: Doing my backups — it’s a good feeling to know your data will (probably) be safe if your computer suddenly carks it.

This time around, I have way too much data to actually back up the lot – so I’m being selective. Filelight is very helpful here; I can see exactly where my disk space is going, spot tmp files that I should have cleared up long ago, and so on.

One thing is clear — I have too many MP3s. How am I supposed to listen to all of those?

Tags: computer, disk, feeling, filelight, linux, lot, space, spot, time, tmp, way