Perhaps I'm using this log too much, but I'm sure it will pass after the newness wears off.
I just got my friends PC via UPS and cracked open the case. It had stuff moving around inside, so I didn't want to take any chances of having something loose, or a piece of metal short the motherboard.
Well, after removing some old dried up rubber bands, a wad of some kind of brownish paper-bag-shredded-like dust, I turned the thing on and watched. Finds the hard drive, but won't load anything. Just a blank screen.
Fdisk shows a Windows NT partition, which is what is supposed to be on this system. I tried using Slackware 9.0 CDROM to boot and see if I could read the NTFS Partition, but ntfs isn't supported in the boot kernel, and the module isn't available. So I tried Mandrake 9.1 CDROM, since it has the NTFS resize option. But it had trouble mounting. I figured it was file corruption at the least.
So, upstairs we go. Pulled the skins off the kids Windows XP Pro computer and plugged the hard drive as slave and booted up. XP wanted to run a CHKDSK right away on the drive, but I bypassed, figuring it could be worse if repairs are made without knowing the status of the drive. So after a really long boot sequence I got the desktop. Of course I could hear the drive really working, re-reading man times over.
The drive is an IBM DeskStar, and it has jumper settings for 15/16 heads? I was wondering if the jumper was originally set for 15 when the drive was installed, and my friend, in the course of swapping different drives, switched the wrong jumpers and made it 16 instead of 15. So I powered off, switched jumper to 15 heads and rebooted. XP wanted to CHKDSK again and I refused, at the desktop XP wanted to format. I knew that was no good and shutdown, swapped jumpers back to 16 and started her up again. This time I let it CHKDSK. Lots of errors, but all corrected and it looks pretty good right now. At least most of the information on the drive is readable. I'm not sure if it will boot, but after I run a full disk scan for bad sectors I will throw it back into my friend's PC and see what happens. If it works, I will backup the drive, then try to shrink the partition using Mandrake and the ntfsresize program. If it works I'll be able to install a 2 GB W98 Partition, a 6 GB Linux Partition and the rest will be FAT32 for sharing between operating systems.
Time to check on the drive...

Ok, I was able to change the settings with Opera set as Opera and not as MSIE 6.0.

I was able to change the time zone settings. I am using Internet Explorer right now. I was using Opera for Linux (version 7.10 beta) when I was having problems with changing the settings. If I remember, I'll try some different settings in Opera to see if that makes a difference.

Now for the main reason I set this blog up in the first place.
I have a vpr matrix laptop, model 200a5. I have to send it in for repair, the DVD/CDRW drive crapped out. Before this, I had to send it in for a video problem, no display. I know it worked, because it would boot and I could see it on my home network. When I got it back, the display worked, but it no longer booted into Linux. It hung looking for, or setting up PCI/pcmcia services. I was able to disable the pcmcia setup, and it would boot and work normally, but when I ran the pcmcia startup script, it would hang. I decided to try to re-install the Windows XP Home edition that came witht the computer. It is a recovery disk, but it hangs after trying to switch to the graphics mode section of the setup. I even tried installing Windows 2000 Pro, but it hangs at "Setup is starting windows 2000" prompt. I noticed that the motherboard replacement from this last repair included an updated BIOS dated 10/11/02. (It's a Phoenix BIOS with Best Buy BIOS Version BM1 Q0F0B) If I disable the PNP, I get an error on booting stating that IRQ cannot be assigned to the PCI Serial Bus. (Warning IRQ not configured - PCI Serial Bus Controller on Motherboard Bus:00, Device:0C, Function:00)
Incidentally, since the DVD/CDRW drive was not working, I used Microsoft Windows 2000 RIS (Remote Installation Service) to boot via PXE and install Windows 2000. If you need to install 3rd party network or other drivers, you need to make a directory "$oem$" at the same level as the i386 directory. In that directory you can have various sub-directories for network adapter, modem, video, etc. Copy the .inf and .sys files from your driver into the appropriate directory and then edit the "ristndrd.sif" file in the "i386" directory, adding, or changing the following to [Unattended] section:

OemPreinstall = yes
OemPnPDriversPatch = "Drivers\network adapter;Drivers\modem;Drivers\video"

Of course, modify the correct pathnames to your driver.

The other thing I learned was that the F12 key does not work for the network bootup process. You need to press Fn+F12 in order for the PXE client to boot from the network.

OK Back to the repair. I am backing up my linux partition. I am using bzipped tar file.
tar -X exlude.filename -cjf /mnt/fat32/vprmatrix.tgz /

The exlude file included /mnt and /proc (although I didn't do the proc the first time.)
I suppose It ought to be named tbz or tar.bz since I used bzip instead of gzip, so I will rename the archive file to reflect that when it's done.

It took about 20 minutes to back up 2.5GB.

I can't seem to change any settings on this board. I want to change the time zone to Central Daylight, but it keeps telling me that the subdomain is already in use. Perhaps there is a period of time required before these things sync up. I'll try later.

I also don't like the way the ads cover up the description of this page. I'll see if another template might work, or perhaps they do it on purpose. After all, what do you want for nothing?

Well, I changed the template, that fixed the ad problem, but I still can't change time zone information, or any other settings yet.

First blog to see how this works