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

Tech: Troubleshooters: Making a bootable CD from a bootable floppy image.
Making a note of this for future reference — it should be handy next time I need to do a BIOS or firmware upgrade on my Thinkpad.

I ran into the need for this recently when trying to upgrade the BIOS on my Thinkpad running Linux, so hibernation would work. IBM don’t provide BIOS upgrade tools for Linux, so you have to keep a Windows partition around. (Yes, I pay the Windows Tax — I’ve been bitten by proprietary firmware upgrades requiring it in the past, as in this case.)

Amazingly, however, even after paying the Tax, the ‘non-diskette’ BIOS upgrade (ie. the standalone Windows app) doesn’t work from Windows XP! Instead, you get a hard hang when it tries to bring the machine down from XP to a single-app mode to perform the upgrade. Running from DOS similarly fails, because the BIOS upgrade app is a WIN32 application. Clever.

Eventually, I wound up reformatting my Windows partition, installing Windows 98 (!), and running the BIOS upgrade app from that worked fine. But next time around, I should be able to save myself a few hours of MCSE imitation by using this floppy-to-CD trick… here’s hoping. ;) PCs Are Hard.

Tags: app, bios, firmware, linux, partition, tax, tech, thinkpad, time, upgrade, windows

Computer: Argh. When I bought my laptop, I had no option but to buy it with Windows XP — IBM doesn’t seem to sell them any other way. (you can pay extra to buy it that way from EmperorLinux, but really, the main reason I wouldn’t want it is to save money, I’m afraid.)

Anyway, so I kept the XP partition safe, and jumped through various hoops to keep it in one piece; after all, it had cost me money to pay for that Windows license, and you never know when I might need it to upgrade some firmware or whatever.

Well, after trying (twice) to upgrade some firmware — the BIOS, namely, to get APM hibernation working — and having XP crash on me both times, I left it for a bit.

That was a couple of weeks ago. I just tried to check some files on the /windows partition — and something has scribbled all over the FAT32 sectors. Rien de Windows plus. :(

(Prime suspect right now is the Phoenix BIOS ’suspend-to-disk’ tool — I just looks flakey, and I know it goes in and tweaks with some kind of undocumented BIOS wierdness. I bet anything it’s told the BIOS that the first FAT32 partition was a suspend partition, and one of the failed susp-to-disk attempts scribbled all over it.)

I suppose I’ll probably reinstall at some stage… if only to get this bloody BIOS upgraded and suspend-to-disk working!

Tags: argh, bios, computer, fat, firmware, laptop, money, option, partition, way, windows

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