Conclusions: 1. There's something wrong with the CD drive? 2. I'm still great at missing the obvious

[sniffnoy]

Resolution:

1. Mike Dvorak lent me an Ubuntu CD. It didn't work either. Conclusion: Either my CD drive is just broken, or I had to actually give it priority instead of just selecting it from the boot menu (which would be dumb).

2. Somehow, I had entirely forgotten that we had another computer in the basement. Flash drive made, problem solved. Yes, I really forgot about that. No, I don't know how.

-Harry

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Flash drive worked, CD didn't? Definitely sounds like the drive itself is broken. Mind you, usually I give CDs highest priority, but yeah, your having tried directly selecting it in the boot menu pretty much rules priority out as a problem.

Or maybe it had something to do with the mysterious problems with the computer itself you've told LJ nothing about? ;)

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

No, it doesn't. The big problem is a hard drive failure. Quite a bad one, apparently. (How it happened so suddenly, I have no idea.)

At first I figured I would just run fsck and be done with it. For whatever reason, though, the ramdisk didn't *have* fsck! Yes, really. No e3fsck, no form of it at all.

OK, so, next step, make a boot CD / flash drive so you can fsck the thing, right? But at this point I realize that if this is the *second* time this has happened recently, I should probably get the underlying hardware error repaired.

So I bring it in to a local repair shop (Beagle Brain, same place as last time). OK, we can replace the hard drive, install Ubuntu, transfer stuff over. Although, I'll have to pay if I want them to do the "install Ubuntu" step, hence me getting the computer back and doing that myself, hence these entries.

Unfortunately it seems the old hard drive, is, well, quite fucked. They didn't manage to recover much from it (and none of the directory structure :-/ ) They have a more reliable procedure they can do, but it's more expensive. Fortunately I don't have to pay any more if they don't manage to recover any more; also it takes a few days, so in the meantime I've taken the computer home and got stuff running again.

So, yeah, memory hole once again. :-/

I do have essentially all of my integer complexity work backed up on a flash drive - hm, I should go restore that right now - but considering the thing holds 4 GB, I really could have backed up way more than that!

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Worth noting: I managed to recover quite a bit of a physically damaged partition with a program called testdisk. It's in Ubuntu's repository, and may be worth a try.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'll keep that in mind should this happen again. (Hopefully not...)

In this case, it looks like it wouldn't have helped much. They're done with the "advanced" recovery and it looks to be much better than the previous one (yay, directory structure!); they're currently transferring everything over. Why does this mean testdisk wouldn't have helped much? Because the difference between the two recovery methods that they do, is that the former just works directly off the hard drive, whereas the latter involves imaging the drive and reading off of that - i.e., it gets around problems not with the data being damaged, but with the HD failing to read itself correctly. Doesn't seem like testdisk would help with that.