Inanis.net

A week ago I decided I wanted to try Ubuntu on Lappy-686, so I made a DriveImage XML image of the drive in case I needed to go back to Windows.

Jump ahead to today. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on lappy, and lappy didn’t like it. More correctly, I didn’t like it. I love Ubuntu for servers, but it just lacks, I don’t know, "the capability to do anything productive without a crash course in application training" for desktop computers. Add to the fact that Asus put some weird wonky version of a Radeon Mobility 9200 in the thing, so I can’t get working what I really want to work: Compiz Fusion. The FGLRX driver doesn’t work with the graphics chip, the "ati" and "radeon" drivers along with the graphics chip won’t let Compiz enable the nice features and the online suggestions of installing the XGL X Server causes X to bomb and default to VESA mode.

Oh well. No biggie. I’ll just drop my DriveImage XML image back on the lappy. Threw the HDD into my USB cradle and dropped the image back on the drive…. I mean to say I started the process 4 hours ago and I am still waiting for the process to finish. It just may have been faster to reinstall the machine from scratch, including all the drivers, software and restoring the data (which I backed up separately).

I don’t know. It’s all good. The downtime gave me time to play Scrabble with Gac. The cloud does have a silver lining! Wait, that’s not silver… thats SNOW. 16 INCHES OF SNOW!

*rolls around in snow, making snow angels, sounding like one of the 3 Stooges, and waiting for DIXML to do it’s thing…*

Forgot how to get into a Toshiba BIOS, so I researched it and here’s how you do it:

1. Make sure the machine is off
2. Hold down the ESC key
3. Turn on computer by Holding down power button The machine will beep, then display: Check System, then press [F1] key.
4. Release ESC key
5. Press F1 key

HP Compaq nx6125 or Agency Series laptops boot Windows XP wacky, due to weird drive geometry.

I had a customer’s machine, an HP Compaq nx6125, also known as an HP Agency Series HSTNN-C12C. The hard drive was failing, so naturally, it needed to be imaged to a new drive and replaced.

I yanked the drive, used Ghost on another PC to image the drive to an image file, then drop the image on a good one. Then, I installed the good one in the laptop. It would not boot. All I got was a blinking cursor.

Naturally, I thought that there was some sort of weird boot sector issue, so I booted to the Windows XP CD and used both FIXBOOT and FIXMBR, to try to correct this. No joy.

I then tried some tools to extract the boot sector from the failing, but booting, hard drive and then write them to the working drive. No success. Next, I tried googling the issue to see if anyone else had this problem. The answer is YES, but noone found a proper solution, or at least they didn’t report their findings.

For giggles, and to isolate some weird kind of “this machine requires it’s original install discs to do something weird to the boot sector” issue, I tried a clean install of Windows XP on the good drive. The machine booted into Windows. AH HA!

My guess was that the laptop has some sort of weird hard drive geometry configuration, so I checked the BIOS. It wasn’t any help. It’s one of those “this is an OEM machine and you are a stupid user so we disable access to any and all useful techie settings because we don’t want you to break it you idiot,” types of BIOS. So, I pulled a solution out of my a**. If a clean install of Windows creates a proper boot sequence, and the files I want are on the old drive, lets just do a clean install, and then overwrite the new drive’s files with the customer’s data.

I began a Windows installation on the new drive, and just after the second part of setup came up, you know, the GUI part, I shut the machine off. Then, I yanked the drive, and attached it and the old drive to another machine. I then used Microsoft’s ROBOCOPY tool with the /MIR, /W:0 and /R:0 switches to forcefully overwrite ALL the files on the new drive with those from the old drive. This gives me the customer’s data, OS, programs and everything, but this time with a working boot sector.

Put the new drive back in the laptop, and voila, it boots up to the customer’s installation. Everything is hunky-dory.

I love being a technician.