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further adventures in Ubuntuland...

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Here I sit, about 50 hours into my first big Ubuntu crash. Everything appears back to normal. I've managed to get the OS back up and running without destroying Windows or the hard drive. It's wasted about two days of my time and my faith in Linux has been shaken, but I'm willing to proceed. After all, what happened was at least fifty percent my fault...

My troubles began at about midnight on Wednesday. My laptop had gone to sleep and I tried bringing it out of hibernation to do a little work before going to bed. The machine did indeed wake up, but the hard drive kept spinning, and I was unable to use any of the programs for at least five minutes. This state of affairs was particularly frustrating to me because I had the same problem in Windows, and I was hoping that Ubuntu would solve the problem. After waiting what seemed like an eternity, I decided to cut power to the machine and start from scratch. Little did I know at the time what “from scratch” would mean.

It turns out that downing a machine coming out of hibernation in Ubuntu is a really bad idea. When I restarted the machine, instead of the familiar login screen and obnoxious drum beat I was used to, I was greeted by a black screen with a lot of text in which the words corruption and failed were prominently featured. Bad news. Rebooting was no help, and neither was the so-called “recovery mode.” I frantically booted Windows. Whew, my impatience had only ruined my operating system of preference. The Evil Empire remained intact.

I've never been burned out of my home, but I imagine that a crashed operating system is the digital equivalent. The first thing you ask is: “wow, everything's gone, I wonder just what was in there?” My first thought was about the loss of an incredibly boring piece of busy work for my job that will have to be re-typed (ohh, the pain!), but what else was there? When exactly did I back up last? The effects of losing about a month of data revealed themselves slowly over the course of of recovering the system. Suffice it to say I will be going to at least weekly backups for the foreseeable future.

I had actually been planning to rebuild my Ubuntu system for some. I had written in my previous note about Ubuntu that my first experiment with the software resulted in it hijacking my system and partitioning my hard drive. That was a libel. Ubuntu didn't partition anything. The truth was actually much worse. Ubuntu installed itself in parallel with Windows on the same partition of an NTSC hard drive and added a boot loader to ask me which system I wanted to use on startup. This is terrible for two reasons: first, according to my infallible Peruvian Linux Support Service, Linux performs poorly on NTSC hard drives. Second, putting two operating systems on one partition exposes both to harm if something happens to only one of them. The solution is to split the hard drive by creating a partition and install the second OS in that space. The boot loader would allow me to choose between Ubuntu and the Dark Side.

I had been putting off this change both because I was lazy and also because I was worried about harming the Windows side of the box. I have a Windows recovery disk, but it's old and I have no idea if it works. All of the partition programs I looked at contained dire warnings about making backups and having boot disks at the ready in case of disaster. I didn't have one, and if the Windows side ran into trouble I'd have to pay money to the Evil Empire to replace the system. Now, of course, I had no choice, so I proceeded with an abundance of caution. That's another way of saying that I spent a whole lot of time in front of the computer, backing everything up (2 hrs), defragmenting the drive (3hrs), downloading the software (2 hrs), downloading it again after it failed (2 hrs), etc. Finally I was ready to install. At first I had tried to simply let the Ubuntu install disk do the job, but it gave up during the process, giving me a needless panic attack that it had screwed up the Windows side of the box. I decided it was a better idea to partition the drive myself. I took a deep breath and dove in. I used the open source G-Parted software that I had burned onto a startup disk. I'm happy to report that it's straightforward, easy to use, and error free. First I shrunk the single partition where Windows resided, then I made a separate partition with the free space. When I ran the Ubuntu install again it whizzed through the process, and the program was back on my box.

Or sort of. I had downloaded the install program for Ubuntu from the local university in Latvia because it was fast, but, as it turned out, out of date. The first thing to do after installing Ubuntu is to allow it to update with the latest packages. It looks like the good folks at the university haven't updated their image in a while, because there were 247 packages to update and install. I left my computer thinking hard and went to work. After I returned home I started the long task of rebuilding my digital home. The wallpaper needed to be replaced, the telephone didn't work (I had lost the document I'd written about how to solve the microphone problem), and nothing was in the right place. After about six hours of screwing with the system it is more or less back to where I had it. Outstanding issues include loading different dictionaries into Open Office and putting Baiba's documents on her account.

So much for my big system crash. Ubuntu is on it's own partition and performs better, just as Peruvian Tech Support said it would. For all the terror I went through getting to this point, the story seems boring now. I don't expect too many people will appreciate reading it. Here's the moral of the story: use Ubuntu but do NOT use Wubi. Create a partition and load the OS in its proper place. Backup often. Save all those nice instructions you wrote for yourself. Yeah, I guess that's it.