Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn’t write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and needed the power cut to reboot. I immediately realized that there was a serious hardware problem. Then I spent the better hours of the evening trying to salvage everything from the old drive to a new drive, only to have the new drive seemingly show the same symptoms. It is a laptop of course and so I assume it’s the bus for the drives or the cdrom. I pull out the cdrom and it seems to behave itself just fine. This morning as I was checking the last of the package updates it dawned on me how different things would have been if it were a windows laptop. The laptop runs linux and when the system froze I immediately assumed it was either the hard drive or the drive adapter to the mainboard. Why?
Tag: cdrom
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Booting from CD when a systems BIOS won’t let you
Along the way on my permissions nightmare last night, I made matters worse by changing permissions on a fairly important file. In order to fix that I was going to need to reboot from a boot disk. The only problem was boot floppys typically don’t come with reiserfs support (only the boot cds I’ve found have that.) AND my server has for some time refused to boot from the CD. Now, the BIOS will let you choose CD as the first boot device but it promptly decides that there is a “BIOS checksum mismatch” and reloads the defaults which leaves you booting from floppy, then hard drive…. Now, I’ve changed the CMOS battery twice within a 2 month span and I think the longest things lasted were about a week before it reverted to that “BIOS checksum mismatch” (For those of you smart enough to suggest I replace the CMOS battery.) Now, it could be that the battery I replaced with had expiired it’s shelf life already I suppose. But….
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CDROM drives with yellow exclamation point in Windows XP
I ran into something I hadn’t yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them had a yellow exclamation point in the device manager listing. Of course, two drives don’t just go bad at the same time, so I wondered if it might be the Secondary IDE connector on the system board or the cable that was causing the trouble. In retrospect, I might could have assumed that they wouldn’t show at all if that were the case, but I checked against a usb connector and good cd drive just to be sure that we could rule out hardware as the problem. So, then it came time to see if the driver was the problem.
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Tools of the trade – USB2.0 to IDE & SATA Cable
Today is the first chance I”ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter “in the field”. I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5″) or desktop (3.5″) drives as well as larger (5.5″ cdrom’s) But, it was a bit of a nuisance to have to remove the drive that I had in the case and carrying around an empty case seemed like a waste, so I ordered this from Newegg.com It’s made by Sabrant (in China..) and is designed to connect any IDE or SATA drive to the usb port.
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Qemu 0.8.1 speed improvement with -kernel-kqemu and kqemu 1.3.0pre7
I mentioned the other day revisiting the qemu site to discover new versions of both qemu and the non-redistributable kernel module kqemu (qemu is now at version 0.8.1 and kqemu is at 1.3.0pre7). There’s also a new startup switch -kernel-kqemu which enables FULL virtualization of both kernel and user code. I could feel a difference in speed, but I wanted to give a test with a stopwatch to see what the numbers were and this is what I found.
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Check your hard drive’s temperature in Linux
I started using this program after frying a hard drive in 6 months. It was on the server and serving up Audio 24/7 and it was sandwiched between a cdrom drive and another hard drive. There was no air flow around the hard drive and subsequently it had a very short and very rough life. When it started failing at 6 months, I started investigating the possible cause and how to keep another for failing so quickly.
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part I
I had a chance today to start the upgrade process for Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000). Now, let’s see…. a bit of background. Mandriva (Mandrive/Mandrake) has been my favorite distro since converting to linux several years back (around Mandrake 8.1 or 8.2) I’ve had it running on the laptop since then and was up to 10.1 official (if I remember correctly). The last upgrade I did, I just setup the install sources in urpmi and did urpmi –auto-select –auto from the command line and off it went. In short order I had a fresh upgraded system. Today was not to be so smooth.
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Qemu revisited
I mentioned Qemu a short while back. I’ve used it in the past for testing linux livecds. After doing the writeup though I was encouraged to look at it again and see if/how much it’s improved since I last got an update. Wow….
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qemu for testing linux livecd’s
I’ve mentioned a few things about linux livecds in the last few days and thought I would also mention a great tool for testing them. QEMU is a program, available for Linux or Microsoft Windows, that allows you to run an operating system within your current desktop. Let me try to clarify, I have my linux desktop fully booted with the editor for this post in the background and open up a run prompt. In the run prompt I type “qemu -cdrom /cdimages/klax-kde-3.4.2.iso” *(quotes are not necessary). This gives it the recent klax-kde-3.4.2 preview livecd as the thing to boot. A window pops up and it’s booting now as I type in the background. I can switch to it, make it full screen and play around with it without the need for a reboot. (more…)