A Man and his Penguin

A friend of mine has a laptop computer, where Windows got corrupted and wouldn’t start. I decided to recover her data using a Linux Live CD before bringing the computer back to factory condition.

After a brief struggle setting the computer to boot from CD (her housemate had changed the BIOS password to "pigs", lol), I booted Damn Small Linux to begin the process of recovering her data.

But DSL didn’t want to mount my new HDD MP3 player. So I tried Puppy, and that wouldn’t recognise any USB devices for unknown reasons (probably hardware incompatibility with the laptop’s USB card). So I tried Knoppix, and Konqueror kept crashing while I tried to drag the old files to my drive. So I tried doing it from the command line in Knoppix. After a little while, it just stopped copying. (and the K panel also crashed)

So I tried Dynebolic, and the file manager wouldn’t start up! So I tried setting up Samba (networking software) on my computer, and copying the files from the laptop directly to my computer. That worked for a short while, then the laptop crashed.

So I tried Samba again with DSL, and I couldn’t even get it to work.

FINALLY I did what I should’ve done all along. I booted up Ubuntu on the laptop, and successfully copied the files from the Windows hard disk to my MP3 player. Ubuntu was the only distro that actually didn’t crash.

Now, the really silly thing: While I was trying to get Samba working, I changed the hostname of my computer… to nothing. This caused my user account to be denied access to the sudo command… not good! When I tried to boot up Ubuntu under Recovery Mode, I couldn’t start up the control panel that lets you change the hostname of the system. After much frustration and wrangling, including fiddling with the sudoers file and recursively changing the permissions of the entire Linux partition, I discovered where the hostname is stored, and changed it back. (/etc/hostname, for anyone who’s interested).

Thanks to the people who sent me messages and told me that they read my web log. And yes, I did get the laptop going again under the heel of Windows. My friend needs to use MYOB, so unfortunately I couldn’t convert the computer to Ubuntu. Would’ve been good though!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.