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.

I stumbled across a great piece of software today called “Ext2 Installable File System for Windows.” This program allows you to mount a Linux partition from your Windows Explorer. How? Simply download the file from www.fs-driver.org/download.html, run the install program and assign a drive letter to the partition. You also have the option to have it reassign the drive letter on each boot. This works great on my laptop since I’m having to dual-boot Vista to get dedicated CS4 support. I’m able to pull all of my source files and assets directly off my Linux partition. It works great and it’s fast. This is a practical way to avoid having to create a FAT32 or NTFS partition that is just for sharing -or- having to use your Windows partition to store both your Linux and Windows files.

I have been struggling with blogs and forums trying to find the working solution for my dilemma since I originally installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu. I needed USB support for my virtual machines in order to really smooth out my work flow. My guest OS is Windows Server 2003 and my host OS is Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to be able to clone the virtual machine’s hard disk using Clonezilla and my external Western Digital, USB 500 GB hard drive. I realize that it is possible to “clone” a virtual machine through VirtualBox but, as I work on multiple physical machines, I needed the disk image to be able to install a fully configured guest OS without having to worry about the ID conflict that is common with cloning virtual machine’s the wrong way. I have compiled a step-by-step process on how I was able to successfully set up USB support. If at any point, your not seeing the same results I saw, just reboot. It is recommended by everyone who wrote an article about this. I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and Kernel Linux 2.6.24-19.generic. Here we go…

Welcome back Hardy Heron. I’ve been using 8.10 on my Toshiba Satellite but after the upgrade, I was having issues with the suspend - or standby - process. Sometimes I would be able to bring my laptop out of the suspended state and other times I would lose my work and the work located on my virtual machines. Not good. I suppose that explains the long-term support (LTS) version of 8.04 that makes it so stable. I had read that your graphics driver can cause issues with the suspend stand. Since I am using an ATI Radeon X1200, I attempted to use both the open and restricted drivers that are available for that model. No luck. I also adjusted power management settings but that had no affect.

Last night I upgraded my Toshiba Satellite from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 with only minor issues. I had an 8.10 CD so I added that as a software source, allowed version upgrades and refreshed my update list. I began the upgrade to 8.10 and waited. I had to download around 1 GB of files for upgrade. I restarted my computer and, because of my previous tinkering with the Alsa sound mixer, was greeted with a banshee-like (mic and speaker feedback) call from my laptop’s speakers during boot-up. I plugged in a pair of headphones and let the boot-up continue.

I’ve spent the last 3 hours trying to get VirtualBox setup and running on my Fedora 10 system. I’ve scowered the web in search of assistance for a “can’t create COM object” error - whatever that might be. I’ve had no luck. No support on any forums from anyone. I’ve even found where other Fedora users have complained of this issue, but so far I haven’t found where anyone has followed up or solved the error. First Adobe Flash Player had issues, now VirtualBox. Currently, Sun is only providing a Fedora 9 compatible package. It’s lacking full compatibility with version 10 and that causes a few problems.

You wouldn’t think that doing this would be so complicated but apparently it is. I tried multiple methods of simply downloading the RPM install file from adobe.com but to no avail. The real problem is getting Firefox to recognize the new add-on. Either way, just to cover all the bases, I’m going to list the steps and explain what I did to the best of my knowledge. This works for the 32 and 64-bit architecture. SKIP the 5th step if you are only using the 32-bit architecture of Fedora.

In my last post, I mentioned an audio problem I was having with Ubuntu. The mic was not capturing audio so I went through a tutorial on how to fix my audio with a few modifications. Those modifications set me my audio askew and I realized what the problem was. If you bring up the volume control panel and click on File > Change Device, you might see 5 or more choices for audio devices. You must be sure to choose the correct device for audio to function properly. For some reason, the Alsa mixer works almost universally from what I’ve read and experience personally. It is my default, or 1st option, on the device list. There was another option for “analog input: front” which turned out to be my front volume switch however the Alsa stilled managed to function better (as in more volume). I’m still trying to figure out why my mic isn’t working when I’m able to get feedback and echos when I bring up the Alsa Mixer app by typing “alsamixer” in the terminal window, but we’re making progress.

Much learned in this past week. I’m blogging from my laptop while I watch the Fedora install and update on my HP xw9300 Workstation. Yes, I went ahead and decided to install trhe 64-bit Fedora 10. My xw9300 was running a 64-bit Ubuntu 8.1 and Windows XP Pro. I’ve been doing a lot of software testing recently and XP absorbed quite an infection. You know the type - incessant IE pop-ups that just will not go away. After trying every spyware, malware and virus scanning program I had, I dropped XP and pushed Fedora into the xw9300. The HP xw9300 hardware was originally developed in cooperation with Red Hat, Microsoft and Nvidia. I’m tired of XP so I decided to give the machine a try with Red Hat’s Fedora. I installed Windows Server 2003 first just for dedicated Adobe CS3 support and then installed Fedora. Fedora was quick and easy to install and also provided a Boot Loader section for dual-booting. Wifi worked immediately along with other hardware. Two minors bugs related to additional package installation and updates but mostly a walk in the park.

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.