I want to give Linux a shot

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 7:53 pm

Nevermind, I just gave it more time and it finally said something.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda bs=1M
dd: opening `/dev/hdb': Permission denied
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ man sudo
Reformatting sudo(8), please wait...
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda bs=1M
^[[D^[[C^[[B^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[C^[[D^[[D^[[A^[[B^[[B^[[B^[[A38166+1 records in
38166+1 records out
40020664320 bytes (40 GB) copied, 9636.96 seconds, 4.2 MB/s
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

I wish it would have given me a little more acknowledgement when I entered the command though. Now, time to see if it actually worked.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 9:18 pm

Looks like it should have worked. It shouldn't have taken that long though - I typically get transfer rates twenty times that.

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 9:20 pm

Crap. It didn't boot. I pulled out the old drive and tried to boot with the new one..... it failed. *sigh*

I went back into Linux and took a look at GParted. It shows the 40 gig partition there with the rest unallocated... I don't know why it didn't work.

Here's a screenshot of GParted.

It would appear that the 40 gig is marked as unused. It also appeared that way when I first took a look at GParted with both drives in. I'm not sure what's up with that.

When I click on 'Information' on that partition, it says at the bottom, "Unable to read the contents of this filesystem! Because of this some opperations may be unavailable. Did you install the correct plugin for this filesystem?"

It also said that when I first looked at it when I had both drives in. It was probably foolish of me to continue the process without asking if it mattered. BTW, its status was 'un mounted' if I remember correctly.

What should I do?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 11:29 pm

Put the old drive back in (IDE primary slave again), and take a screenshot of GParted looking at that drive.

The partitioning looks correct, but it doesn't seem to be able to recognise the filesystem. If the original drive is OK (should be - we didn't write anything to it), we can try copying the filesystem data over.

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 2:07 pm

I thought Linux was able to handle Fat32...

What do you mean by copy the filesystem data over? If this is going to be way too much trouble for you, just tell me and I'll just forget about the old drive and reinstall windows on the new one. Although it would be extemely nice to have my old drive cloned... I spent a lot of time on the thing.

Edit: Gah! I can't wait to get this Linux huha installed! It just feels so much better than Windows. I love the workspace concept. Pretty much everything I've seen so far I like. It's got me motivated to start programming for the DC again. But... first things first of course.

Ex-Cyber · Post by **Ex-Cyber** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 6:38 pm

Where did the boot process fail with the new drive?

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 7:09 pm

I'm not sure. At the very begining I guess. I don't remember the exact wording. I'm not even sure you could consider the boot itself a failure because I don't think it ever existed. I have a feeling that I copied 40gig worth of zeros to the new drive because linux didn't know how to read the old one.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 7:32 pm

It wouldn't matter if Linux knew how to read the old partition or not, it would have copied it over just the same. The dd command is pretty dumb - it just copies data from one file / device to another, without caring what format it's in.

GParted can read FAT32, by the way. So that's not the problem. Something appears to have happened to your partition. Pull the old drive out (if something did damage it, we don't want to further damage the original), and we'll see if we can recover the copy.

The most common problem with FAT32 drives that causes it to become unrecognisable is a corrupted bootsector. Let's see what the bootsector of your new drive's Windows partition looks like. Type this command to extract the bootsector from the first partition of the primary master drive:

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=bootsector bs=512 count=1

That copies the first 512 bytes (the bootsector) to the file called "bootsector" Then type this command to see if it can be identified:

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file bootsector

It should say something like "bootsector: x68 boot sector". If it says that, the bootsector is fine and we need to try something else. If it says "bootsector: data" that means the bootsector has become corrupt somehow, and needs to be fixed.

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 7:55 pm

Code: Select all

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/hda1 of=bootsector bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes (512 B) copied, 4.11686 seconds, 0.1 kB/s
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ file bootsector
bootsector: x86 boot sector, code offset 0x58, OEM-ID "MSWIN4.1", sectors/cluster 64, Media descriptor 0xf8, heads 255, hidden sectors 63, sectors 78156162 (volumes > 32 MB) , FAT (32 bit), sectors/FAT 9540, reserved3 0x800000, serial number 0x304619d3, unlabeled

Edit: I don't think my original drive is damaged because I was still able to boot from it and use it just fine.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 8:35 pm

That's all correct. Try mounting it:

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cd /media
sudo mkdir hda1
sudo mount /dev/hda1 hda1 -o ro

If that worked (didn't show any error messages), you should be able to list the contents of your drive:

Code: Select all

sudo ls hda1

If that all works, then the copy would appear to be fine, and it theoretically should be bootable. Try installing Ubuntu onto the drive anyway, and let it install it's own bootloader. It should add a boot menu entry for Windows 98, and you might have better luck with that.

I don't know what GParted's problem is. It doesn't behave like that on my system.

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 9:14 pm

That all worked. I was able to list the contents of the drive... I'll go ahead and install Ubuntu and hope for the best.

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 11:50 pm

I'm mad as friggen heck. I spent all that time installing Ubuntu and it still wouldn't boot.

When I restarted my computer after the succesful install, it did the exact same thing as when I tried to boot windows after the clone.

I wrote down some of the things my computer said when it starts:

'tarded machine wrote:Pri Master Drive - ATAPI Incompatible
Press F1 to Resume

Sure, that sounds really suspicious. But the reason I dismissed that as a problem, at first, was because it has been doing that for years. I've always just hit F1 everytime and it would boot up windows like normal.

After I hit F1, some junk printed up on the screen. I couldn't read it though because it only stayed up for a few seconds before it was cleared out by new print:

'tarded machine wrote:Novell Netware Ready Firmware v1.00
...some random copyright junk...

RPL-ROM-ADR: 0007 9534 87D3
RPL-ROM-IRQ: 5
RPL-ROM-PIO: CC00

RPL-ROM-FFC: 5

Boot Failure

It's wierd though, before I did any of this, when I was inserting the new drive, I found it very odd that the HD that I was using was set as a slave and connected with the middle connector on the IDE cable. Yet it still worked just fine. (it was the only HD in there) I guess it's been like that since some Kurdish guy worked on our computer a long time ago. This sounds kinda stupid, but maybe I should set my new HD as a slave and connect it with the middle connector instead of the end connector. Is it possible that my computer has a few wires crossed? Or are the odds of that idea like a million to one?

Either way, it's late, I'm dissappointed, and I'm going to bed.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 12:08 am

What the hell?

The second set of messages appears to be an attempt to boot off of a network. That probably means that the BIOS has run out of other devices to try to boot, and is trying netboot as a last resort.

The first message is more troubling. There is something wrong somewhere, possibly a hardware problem, and you really need to fix it. If, for example, there's something wrong with the drive controller, it could potentially have killed your old hard drive. You wouldn't want the same fate to befall the new drive, would you?

First, if you have a new IDE cable (one came with your hard drive, perhaps?), remove the one you're using, and use that one instead. Assuming you've not done that already, of course. Make sure everything's plugged in correctly, and so on.

Second, check all the settings in the BIOS setup related to hard drives. If you have any hard-coded drive geometry, get rid of it. The easiest way is to set everything up as auto-detect, if it isn't already.

Third, make sure any anti-virus setting in the BIOS is disabled. These usually write-protect the first block of the hard drive, which makes installing new operating systems pretty difficult. I don't think that happened here, because the partition table on the new drive is OK, but you should make sure anyway.

Finally, if you can get some information on what motherboard you're using, that might help diagnose the problem.

On the positive side, the drive copy seems to have worked perfectly. It just seems to be the BIOS being too stupid to boot from the new disk.

JS Lemming · Post by **JS Lemming** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 9:41 am

Yeah, I asked Google and it said to hit F3 in the BIOS. At that point, my new drive became recognized! Woot! Now my system boots about 500 times faster than it used to.

The point is... everything is friggen working now. And I have you to thank BlackAura.

Now, time to screw around in Ubuntu and make it look the way I want. Apparently I also need to download 180mb worth of updates too....

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 12:23 pm

JS Lemming wrote:The point is... everything is friggen working now. And I have you to thank BlackAura.

Now, time to screw around in Ubuntu and make it look the way I want. Apparently I also need to download 180mb worth of updates too....

Yeah, that is kind of irritating. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that is only three or four individual packages (most notably, OpenOffice, and the Linux kernel).