More Hard Drive and Optical Drive and Linux Joy

As you no doubt have read, I’m having hard drive problems with my laptop.  It’s not so much a problem as a total failure but sometimes we like to stay optimistic (or use Classic British Understatement<tm>, even though I’m not British).

The hard drive continued to sit there and confound Spinrite.  I believe that after a day or two, it was up to 0.0094% done.  Meanwhile, the clicking from Spinrite continued unabated, although Spinrite told me how to fix the problem (not involving ripping the speakers out of the laptop).

As I’m getting ready to go to work, I get a message that the mail server is more than likely down.  Of course the mail server is down.  It’s down almost as much as it’s up lately.  And we can’t virtualize it until EMC pays us a visit and sets up the new addition to the SAN so we’re kinda stuck.  I quickly got on my laptop to VPN into work and see if the errant server would cooperate and reboot remotely (it doesn’t always).  This was simply not going to go easy for me.  I booted up and started VMware player, which immediately gave me errors about needing new items compiled into the OS: I told it to go ahead.  It told me to go away.

In spite of that, VMplayer fired up and with it, my XP desktop.  Why do I bother?  Because the fine folks at SonicWall (our firewall mfgr) haven’t seen fit to assist me in connecting with linux.  Funny – they always call me when support is up.  I told XP to connect to work.  XP chortled and said, “No way, d00d.”  Because the mail server was down and because I was in a hurry, XP was refusing to acknowledge the existence of my wireless network.  I think they got into an argument last night while I was getting my four hours but I long ago gave up trying to figure this stuff out.

Failing wireless, I plugged in the USB modem.  It fired right up, connected (thanks, Verizon) and told the SonicWall app to connect already.  The SonicWall app connected.  I was ready to celebrate with a dance when I realized that it was still trying to obtain an IP address.  Yes, the SonicWall app was winking at the Verizon app, telling it to watch me get aggravated.  And it was damn right – my temperature was going up by the microsecond.  I was spewing all sorts of profanities and probably (further) entertaining the neighbors, who aren’t used to me entertaining before six pm.

I haven’t been able to prove it yet but I strongly suspect that I am intimately involved with the day to day operating functions of the Universe at Large<tm>.  It’s not what you think…. I don’t pull levers or pronounce people dead.  But my theory is that the paranormal grief I fight on a daily basis is somehow connected with the every day flow of matter and the Universe (at Large<tm>).   As best I can figure it, the constant flow of bullshit that befalls me somehow offsets something else and balances the chi of Everything.  On mornings like this, where I simply can not connect to work over a simple internet connection no matter how hard I try, I begin to see where my struggles fit into the larger picture. 

You see, if this crap that no one has ever heard of yet constantly happens to me failed to happen to me, it would upset the balance of the Universe.  No, really.  If for some reason I booted up a laptop and simply connected to work like normal people, things would grind to a screeching halt.  Gravity would be suspended, causing people to leave the ground and go UP in mass quantitues, making it very difficult mow the lawn (which I don’t like doing anyway).  If I turned on a Windows box and it didn’t fail to come up with a fatal error that even Bill Gates had never seen, the financial system would finally collapse for good.  Dogs would be moving in with cats.  People could buy used cars without getting ripped off.  Paychecks would stop arriving.  Pr0n start would stop getting tattoos.  In other words, everything would go to hell.  I got yer rapture for yuh – right here. 

So that is part of the point of this blog.  So long as Nearly Impossible Stuff<tm> keeps happening to me on a daily basis, I’ll be blogging about it and you’ll know that everything is right with the Universe.  If, heaven forbid, I ever start blogging about how well things are going… well…. head for the hills.  You won’t be safe anywhere.

Back in the land of hard drives, I kinda gave up waiting for Spinrite to finish and took out the original drive, put it in a different machine and let Spinrite at it.  It’s probably driving the rodents at work nuts.  I put a different drive into the laptop and got ready to install Xubuntu.

Popped an Xubuntu cd into the drive, booted, and the thing started spewing errors.  Odd, but nowhere near the oddest thing happening today.  I wondered if it was choking on the not-formatted hard drive but it had actually stopped going any further.  I tried again with the same results: trouble reading the disk….

I tried again, telling Xubuntu to just come up as a live disk.  Same thing. 

Just for fun I booted GPartEd, an open source partition editor.  It allowed me to format the drive to my specifications without complaint.  [I made a swap partition, an OS partition, and a HOME partition, just in case this happens again.]

Finally it hit me.. it wasn’t complaining about the not-formatted hard drive, it was complaining about the actual media I was using to install (sr0).  I was astounded because I had burned the cd yesterday and there was no visible corruption.  I burned another cd and booted up.  To the same error.

This was most impressive.  Two cd’s, one burned yesterday and one today, both choking.  I Google’d the error and found that others had seen this issue also.  One said he solved it by swapping his DVD-RW drive for a DVD-ROM drive.  Now that’s interesting….

With two cd’s having failed, I figured I’d try from a USB DVD drive.  I plugged it in, got to the boot menu, and noticed a complete lack of USB Boot option in the menu.   Mind you, this is the same menu that lets me boot from a USB flash drive so I’m not buying. 

I figured it was playing Hide and Seek with me and got into the BIOS.  There was certainly an option to boot to a USB accessory so I knew I wasn’t nuts (by that test anyway….).  Rebooted and once again failed to find the option in the menu.  I knew at this point the laptop was mocking me…. it was a rather unsubtle machination, especially considering the way in which the hard drive gave up the ghost.  It didn’t even look like it was having fun at my expense.  Too damn subtle.

Thinking quickly, I lept into action and consumed Chocolate.  Chocolate is a religious sacrament.   Speaking of which, I was informed that today is the day that people launch ashtrays at each other and walk around with dirty foreheads.  The real surprise here is not that I didn’t know (I’m not Catholic or even close), but that the Pastor among us had to clue-in the Catholics as to what day it was.  I like to play along at home, so in that spirit, I’m giving up tomatoes, tanning, and vigorous exercise for Lent.  When I was twelve, I gave up Judaism for Lent.  There’s just no end to the things I’ll give up for Lent.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, Chocolate as a religious sacrament.  It really is, especially at work.  I have a small candy container (well, it’s a two gallon container so I guess most people would call it a rather large container) full of Chocolate in case someone needs some.  Needless to say, I’m incredibly popular.  I know who to smile at and who I need to make sure I’m not between the Chocolate and, lest I get hurt.

In any case, I somehow managed to locate another internal drive for the laptop and tried booting with that.  BINGO.  Oddly enough, it was the same model but a DVD-ROM instead of a DVD-RW drive.  That other fella who had the same problem made a really good point (even if I chose to ignore it).

Once the Xubuntu (8.10, Inane Icthyopteryx) install started, I went to get something to drink (don’t get me started on Mt Dew Code Red) and by the time I got back, the install was done.  Done.   When was the last time your Windows install went that fast?

I started setting up and installing my chosen programs like mad.  It was a shame that the download of the updates wasn’t exactly cooperating, at least in terms of speed.  It probably sensed that I wanted to get everything set up quickly so my little corner of the Net suddenly became congested, probably out of spite.  I even got the data that I managed to save from the errant spinning disc restored.

I’m sorry – I don’t know a single person who uses a taskbar menu up top.  More importantly, I don’t use it, Gnome and XFCE.  There’s simply no excuse for it.   I might as well go out and buy a Mac (yikes!) if I’m going to continue like this.  [Attention Gnome and Mac users: please keep the hatemail.  I get enough already.]

Not only did the OS install go quickly, Xubuntu 8.10 recognized my non-supported internal wireless card and offered to install the proprietary (non open source) drivers for me.   Any laptop linux warrior has had to do this himself since the dawn of time, using a utility called ndiswrapper.  This issue alone has put more people off linux than most others.  After I told it to go ahead, it worked. (no, gravity is still in force – at least until further notice).

So here I am at 9pm, continuing to set the laptop up and trying to replace all the pr0n.. errrr…. Data that was lost when the hard drive went.

I am tempted to say that the worst is over but if I do that, the earth’s poles would probably reverse, sending the entire planet rocketing into Pluto, which was just demoted.   In case you haven’t heard, Pluto is no longer a planet.  It’s a lawn chair.