Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

Not familiar with Error 17? It is apparently a tricky GRUB error (and not a BIOS error in my case) that carries the message, “Unable to mount partition.” I’m running my Toshiba Satellite with a dual-boot setup on a single hard drive: Vista Ultimate on the first partition and Ubuntu 8.04 and swap partition for the other two. This error conceived itself after I attempted to unsuccessfully resume my laptop out of suspend mode. It simply stopped when I opened my laptop lid. A few errors messages but nothing I don’t see periodically usually Ubuntu. So i powered it off and rebooted only to meet this error in surprise. I couldn’t load Vista or Ubuntu. I was simply stuck reading that same error message repeatedly. I tried everything I could think of including running my Ubuntu LiveCD and Puppy Linux in an attempt to use the GRUB command in a terminal to repair or rebuild itself. For some reason I couldn’t even get Puppy Linux to load to RAM which I thought was strange. I checked forums and message boards but all I could find were vague attempts to assist with a very hindering problem. No one was providing sound assistance until I saw a recommendation for Super GRUB Disk. This tool is very convenient. It was straight-forward: Load the iso (400 KB) to a CD and reboot. It has two modes, boot with assistance or just boot. I’ll just summarize because this CD and its included on-screen instructions are for complete beginners.

Over the past week, I have been exploring some of the other Linux distro options available to me. Initially I branched out when I had to do some data recovery on a corrupted Windows XP hard drive. A friend in the business recommended Puppy Linux for fast load times and non-destructive viewing of the hard drive’s contents. Puppy Linux has the very useful ability to load itself directly into RAM as opposed to loading itself on the local disk drive. The Live CD is only around 90 MB but is amazingly a fully featured OS with an office suite, CD/DVD burners, graphic programs, audio editors and more. I quickly loaded Puppy Linux onto a bootable CD and a few minutes later I was extracting the data I needed from the corrupted hard drive. Nicely done. I might also mention that Puppy Linux is among quite a few different Linux distros that can be completely loaded to RAM.