(no subject)
Sep. 5th, 2009 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickNot that this will be interesting or newsworthy or anything to the studio audience but...
I've been doing some work on my laptop -- it hasn't booted into Windows since about two years ago. I initially partitioned the drive into two roughly equal pieces but it had already been stupidly partitioned by the fine folks at Dell... with a Media Direct partition, a Windows partition, and a Dell Recovery partition. I took the Windows partition and split it to make the two roughly equal pieces. The Media Direct and Dell Recovery parts were teeny.
What I wanted to do earlier this week was remove the Media Direct and Dell Recovery stuff and shrink the Windows partition so that I could use that freed-up space to house more mp3 files so that I could sort through assorted music and Do A Better Job At Managing My Music going forward. (Unlike a responsible collector of tunes, I just accumulate music from all and sundry sources without any particular attention being paid to keeping the shit straight or sorted or anything. Some of it comes in horrible album-long files (ick!) and some of it is totally not correctly tagged and some of it comes off friend-created compilation CDs and has to be ripped without the benefit of autotagging software.) Anyway, that was the plan.
1. Remove two dinky stupid Dell partitions.
2. Shrink Windows partition.
3. Make new linux partition to hold music.
4. Organize music.
5. PROFIT!
So I get to step 1. Gparted (the graphical partition tool) will not even try to run on my hardware because it says you can't have two different blocks (max of four real ones, you can have more "logical" ones) with overlapping geography. Errors. I wound up using a command line tool (To err is human, but to really, really fuck things up you need a command line interface) called fdisk (not the same as DOS/Windows "fdisk") to remove the Dell Mediadirect partition crap. Near as I can tell, "fdisk" stands for "fuck up this disk".
After my experience with fdisk, my computer didn't boot. At all. It gave me "Error 17" which was less than informative. (Error 17 on the grub bootloader means that you have fucked up your partition table.) I booted the box using a Knoppix Live CD. I'd made one and test-drove it to be sure that it worked before I startedfucking up fdisking the partition table. Ten years of admin for the ISP taught me a few things, notably that one's odds of surviving something like jumping out of an airplane are significantly better if one makes the most of his or her opportunity to PREPARE a bit before jumping. The Live CD is a thing that has the entire operating system on a CD (or flash drive or DVD) so that no matter what you do to hard drive, you can still get onto the computer and even online to research your problem and download things to fix it. Knoppix is not the only linux one out there, but it's the one I used.
After considerable research and experimentation, I wound up reloading grub and then fixing the partition information that the grub file had in it. Once I found the proper solution, the fix was kind of easy. Computer booted happily again. Yay!
After I got the machine to boot from the hard drive (as is right and proper), I looked for (and found) more information on partitions. In experimenting, I discovered that Gparted worked for me as soon as I got rid of the Dell Mediadirect / Dell System Recovery stuff. Hooray for pointy-clicky graphical tools. A child could use them... except, again, they have to be run on a hard drive that you're not *currently* using. So, Gparted Live CD to the rescue. Boot off of CD into the Gparted CD and fix your stuff, then shut down, remove CD, reboot, and you're golden. Mostly.
The new partitions needed to be mounted, which happens in fstab. There are some mystic incantations you need to properly mount a partition and internet help pages were very informative in clearing up which mystic incantations I should be using. I fixed up fstab (largely a matter of "Follow the model") and saved it and everything was then fine after reboot. One of the new partitions (I made two, both about fifty gigs in size.) is now mounted as /home/jessica/Music (Yes, I really do need fifty gigs of space for my tunes. I have a lot of tunes.) Not sure what I'm doing with the other one, though it might wind up being mounted as Photos or Pictures or whatever. That'd be handy and it's the other thing that I do that takes up huge swaths of hard drive. Anyway, it's a problem for later. For now, I have a working computer with a hundred gigs more hard drive than I had on Friday night. Go me.
I've been doing some work on my laptop -- it hasn't booted into Windows since about two years ago. I initially partitioned the drive into two roughly equal pieces but it had already been stupidly partitioned by the fine folks at Dell... with a Media Direct partition, a Windows partition, and a Dell Recovery partition. I took the Windows partition and split it to make the two roughly equal pieces. The Media Direct and Dell Recovery parts were teeny.
What I wanted to do earlier this week was remove the Media Direct and Dell Recovery stuff and shrink the Windows partition so that I could use that freed-up space to house more mp3 files so that I could sort through assorted music and Do A Better Job At Managing My Music going forward. (Unlike a responsible collector of tunes, I just accumulate music from all and sundry sources without any particular attention being paid to keeping the shit straight or sorted or anything. Some of it comes in horrible album-long files (ick!) and some of it is totally not correctly tagged and some of it comes off friend-created compilation CDs and has to be ripped without the benefit of autotagging software.) Anyway, that was the plan.
1. Remove two dinky stupid Dell partitions.
2. Shrink Windows partition.
3. Make new linux partition to hold music.
4. Organize music.
5. PROFIT!
So I get to step 1. Gparted (the graphical partition tool) will not even try to run on my hardware because it says you can't have two different blocks (max of four real ones, you can have more "logical" ones) with overlapping geography. Errors. I wound up using a command line tool (To err is human, but to really, really fuck things up you need a command line interface) called fdisk (not the same as DOS/Windows "fdisk") to remove the Dell Mediadirect partition crap. Near as I can tell, "fdisk" stands for "fuck up this disk".
After my experience with fdisk, my computer didn't boot. At all. It gave me "Error 17" which was less than informative. (Error 17 on the grub bootloader means that you have fucked up your partition table.) I booted the box using a Knoppix Live CD. I'd made one and test-drove it to be sure that it worked before I started
After considerable research and experimentation, I wound up reloading grub and then fixing the partition information that the grub file had in it. Once I found the proper solution, the fix was kind of easy. Computer booted happily again. Yay!
After I got the machine to boot from the hard drive (as is right and proper), I looked for (and found) more information on partitions. In experimenting, I discovered that Gparted worked for me as soon as I got rid of the Dell Mediadirect / Dell System Recovery stuff. Hooray for pointy-clicky graphical tools. A child could use them... except, again, they have to be run on a hard drive that you're not *currently* using. So, Gparted Live CD to the rescue. Boot off of CD into the Gparted CD and fix your stuff, then shut down, remove CD, reboot, and you're golden. Mostly.
The new partitions needed to be mounted, which happens in fstab. There are some mystic incantations you need to properly mount a partition and internet help pages were very informative in clearing up which mystic incantations I should be using. I fixed up fstab (largely a matter of "Follow the model") and saved it and everything was then fine after reboot. One of the new partitions (I made two, both about fifty gigs in size.) is now mounted as /home/jessica/Music (Yes, I really do need fifty gigs of space for my tunes. I have a lot of tunes.) Not sure what I'm doing with the other one, though it might wind up being mounted as Photos or Pictures or whatever. That'd be handy and it's the other thing that I do that takes up huge swaths of hard drive. Anyway, it's a problem for later. For now, I have a working computer with a hundred gigs more hard drive than I had on Friday night. Go me.
