Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I had an issue earlier this month with Error 17 (see Super Grub Disk and the Mysterious Error 17). My Ubuntu laptop would not resume properly and I was forced to manually restart it. I did some thorough research on the web yielding a possible fix - fsck. This command - I’m assuming to mean “file system check” - allowed me to “repair” my Ubuntu partition using a Ubuntu LiveCD and terminal. After selecting “yes” to every suggested action that was to be taken by fsck, I rebooted into Super Grub Disk which was able to fix my Grub boot loader. I rebooted again and I discovered that my user name and password didn’t work. From there I did some more reading and realized that I needed to create another user name and password to get access my Ubuntu desktop. I used a LiveCD to get to a terminal and created another user, rebooted back in to my Ubuntu installation and discovered, to my dismay, that my Home folder and many other programs and documents were gone. At that point I knew that some serious rearranging had taken place without my knowledge. Oh, the pangs of being a Linux n00b. I rebooted into my Vista installation and had been using that for a while. I left my Ubuntu partition alone for a week until I could figure how to recover files. I tried running R-Linux from Windows but that yielded no results. I then read an article about the Lost+Found directory and how it works. I checked my L+F directory and there laid a multitude of numbered files and directories that were recovered. That me led to search the directories and I have copied over many of my missing files at this point.

Samba, http://us1.samba.org/samba/,  is widely spoken of throughout the Linux community. It is an efficient way of sharing your network resources like printers and shared drives with Windows computers. I even managed to share my 500 GB USB drive that was attached to my Ubuntu desktop. I installed the latest version of Samba from the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu 8.10. After installation, it installs to the System>Admin menu. Open Samba and take a gander at the window. It has been a few weeks since I installed it but I believe that Samba shares your default Ubuntu printer automatically. Which is great. Anyways, click “Add Share” and select the directory, folder or even USB device (found under the “Media” directory). On the Basic tab, make your share writable and visible and, on the Advanced tab, select your specific user or even allow anyone on your network to see your share.

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.