As followers of my blog know, the hard drive in my laptop recently failed, forcing me to reinstall both Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and Windows 7. Fortunately on the Ubuntu side, I did have Ubuntu One set up with the free 2GB account, which is a cloud-based backup service. However, I found that once I entered my account credentials and expanded the reach of Ubuntu One’s synced folders a bit, only the new folders were syncing: my Documents, Music, and Pictures had the menu option present to sync them on Ubuntu One, but no matter what I did I could not get them to actually sync.
Then, via the Ubuntu One FAQs, I found the key is the command line tools u1sync and u1sdtool. These are both part of the ubuntuone-client-tools package, not installed by default. Continue reading ‘Ubuntu One Subscribed Folders’
As those following my Twitter feed (on Facebook, here or at http://www.twitter.com/mattfast1) know, the hard drive in my laptop failed a couple days ago. The warning signs when it finally failed were pretty impossible to ignore: I had two operating systems installed on the computer. One (Ubuntu LTS 10.04) would not boot at all (“Could not find /sbin/init”), and the other (Windows 7 x64 Ultimate) would boot but was running extremely slowly. It seemed the damage was much more prevalent in the areas that stored the Ubuntu “disk” (really just a file on the Windows NTFS partition), which was quite maddening because I had just downloaded a bunch of songs from Napster.
So I booted a live CD and ran a check on the Ubuntu disk first, in an attempt to salvage some data. Somehow during that process, I lost my /home directory completely, which raises a decent argument for using the Ubuntu One cloud backup service, which was thankfully set up on that PC so I had only lost the most recent downloads. However, the Windows side was a bit more irksome – corrupted files simply wouldn’t let me copy any part of them or interact with the files in any way. Most of that stuff I had backed up somewhere else though.
In the end, I wouldn’t be surprised if I did lose more than I realize. However, most of the stuff I would have lost that I don’t realize now would have been a holdover from the days of Windows Vista on that laptop, that hasn’t been touched in over a year. I do have the old hard drive, so if need be I can always pop that into a SATA drive reader and attempt to extract more of that drive’s contents. And, now that the whole saga is over, I now have a 640GB hard drive in my laptop (used to be 160GB), so I have plenty of space to ferry anything I need from my home to Liz’s, or to either workplace, or anywhere else I need to go. The new drive has 5 partitions: /dev/sda1 is a 100MB partition the Windows installer put the bootloader on, /dev/sda2 is a 200GB partition for Windows 7′s install, /dev/sda5 is a 784MB partition for Linux swap space, /dev/sda6 is a 24.5GB partition for the Ubuntu install, and /dev/sda7 is a 350GB partition for the /home directories on Ubuntu. Of course it’s all accessible from Ubuntu (read+write), and Windows is extremely happy only being able to access 200GB since it only had ~150 on the other hard drive.
Now, I just have to complete the arduous task of reinstalling all my programs on both operating systems, and getting everything set back up the way I like it.
Much of the tech reporting blogs and websites have already started to spread the word about the Best Buy Software Installer (“BBSI”), just days after some websites started making the claim that the Geek Squad Optimization service is a “Big Stupid Waste of Money”. But what some of these pundits may not know is what the BBSI is, or how it is supposed to radically change the way people buy computers today. I’ll try to break it all down.
Continue reading ‘Best Buy Software Installer: Win, or Fail?’
Anyone in the computer repair industry knows, when an update comes along that just doesn’t work properly, whether it be an operating system patch, application patch, or a new version of a driver, that singular bad update becomes the bane of all technicians for anywhere from a few weeks to months, depending on the app it’s patching and the conditions required to recreate the issue.
This was one such instance. On Tuesday August 25, 2009, Microsoft released the KB973879 update to the Microsoft Update service. Since many Windows-based computers run with automatic updates enabled, this update was installed, which was released to correct an infrequently-noticed error that only occurs during the installation of Vista Service Pack 2. However, it appears to have been tested incompletely as on many computers (most of them, from our informal observations, appear to be HP notebooks for some reason), the installation of this patch will cause a severe bluescreen issue (0x7E). This will only occur on 64-bit editions of Windows Vista SP1 however.
Continue reading ‘KB973879: Or, How Microsoft “Inadvertantly” Pushed SP2 To All Vista Machines.’
Recently, as readers of this blog will know, I installed the Windows 7 RTM bits on my laptop, removing everything else that was on there (including Windows 7 RC, Windows Vista Home Premium, and the Kubuntu install I never use). Of course, as part of this I had to reinstall Office 2007 Ultimate, which lead to an interesting problem: Whenever I tried to activate Office, it would give an error stating there was no connection to the internet. Strange, to say the least, because I was surfing the web at the same time.
It gets stranger, though. When I tried to use the “Activate by Telephone” option, the Activation Wizard would dump me out, not even loading any data relating to phone numbers or giving me the lengthy set of numbers I would need to give their computer for activation. Finally after tracking down Microsoft KB 919895, I was able to fix the problem. Below the cut, step-by-step instructions for fixing this rather annoying problem: Continue reading ‘MS Office 2007: Activation?’
By now, I’m sure most people have heard of the release of Windows 7. Those more in the loop know that the final releases were placed on TechNet on Thursday morning. Fortunately, I got on the downloading wagon before most people on that day, so I now have the Gold edition of Windows 7 Ultimate running on my laptop.
The road has been long and hard, though. Continue reading ‘Optimizing Laptop Drive’
[Updated: 2008-10-12] [Updated: 2009-02-26] [Updated: 2009-03-04]
The eBay user known as billsmithautoparts is at it again. Not only did they jerk me around the last time I did business with them (which I throughly documented in that link), but now they\’re continuing to harass me, as shown in their comment to me. Continue reading ‘Updated: Bill Smith Auto Parts’
This is one of the people they tell you to watch out for on eBay. At first, it looks like a nice operation run by decent people. However, once you have a bad experience with them, they become a nightmare. Sure, they do have a 99.7% positive feedback on over 8000 transactions, but the problems they DO have are significant. Continue reading ‘eBay Bidders Beware: billsmithautoparts’
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