[Bassetlug mailing] Hard disk upgrade

[MJ.Wells]

Many of you will know the saga of the laptop given to me with no hard disk
drive. I had found in my 'junk shed' (I have far too much obsolete computer
equipment for a single 'junk box' and that is after donating a car load to
the  York Archaeological Data Service http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/museum/
) a 815Mb drive and managed to put a reasonable GUI driven Linux and server
components on to it.

However, I really would like something a little bigger - say 6Gb to be safe.
So I asked around for a larger drive. The response most frequently met with
was that people did't know drives ever came that small. The second most
frequent response was that if they had once had small drives they had long
since been disposed of.

At last someone said that they had in turn asked around and been given an
80Gb drive which they proposed to replace for the 20Gb drive in their
computer. They would give me the 20Gb drive if they were successful, or the
80Gb to try if it turned out they couldn't get it working.

After a few days they rang me up again to say that they were having trouble
with the 80Gb drive. That 'other OS' would not install properly. After the
long installation process it would reboot and then, just as he thought it
was working, declare that it couldn't find NTLDR. He had tried everything;
reformatting the hard drive, re-reformatting the drive, reformatting and
making sure it really formatted and not just a quick format (This just
renumbers the header information in the sectors and writes a sector empty
tag - it doesn't clear the sector information), and of course sitting
nursing the install through while watching the progress of some fresh paint
to add exitement.

I suggested loading a live Linux and using fdisk to repartion the drive. You
will reailse that the 'other OS' install process claims to repartition each
time, but I am not convinced that it doesn't cheat if it thinks you are not
looking. I know that you have to be very carefull that it does not try to
repair rather than a full install if it finds an existing OS in a folder. If
you do have a prior install you wish to remove then the only safe way is to
completely delete it with a reformat before letting the installer make a
decision.

He had a Gnoppix disc to hand and so went through the motions. After three
solid days and much of the nights I suspect that he was bleary eyed and
'punch drunk' - it didn't work.

I suggested installing Linux onto the hard drive even if he wanted to move
backwards and remove it afterwards and install his prefered OS. I went over
to provide moral support against this leviathan in the hope that combined
forces would prove too great for the problem and we would win.

He had had enough. In the ten minutes of my journey he had become a broken
man. When I entered he cracked up. The only thing that would save his sanity
he declared, sobbing, would be for me to take the 80Gb drive and for him to
re-insert his 20Gb drive. What did he want with more space, it had only been
an idle whim. He would spend the rest of life happy with 20Gb. I
commiserated and did all that a man can do to comfort a chum in need - stand
well back and give vent to rough manly groans and urbane one-liners while
trying to look pained and serious. This was difficult as I had to hide my
great delight in the chance of moving from 815Mb to 80Gb. 

Back home I quickly swapped the disks. Booting up I received the same 'NTLDR
not found' message. I tried loading Gnoppix - no joy. I tried several other
distributions - still no joy. Each time the same show-stoppping problem. The
hard drive was not even being registered as existing. You can't work on
something that isn't there.

I wanted that larger drive so desperately I was not prepared to give up. I
just needed some tool that would get me in to do a full removal of the
partition. I searched around. A thought - maybe this was the time to try
DSL. My eye lighted on a Linux format DVD that had been thrown out my way
recently, it had Puppy Linux on it. Now that sounded arcane and caught my
fancy so I cut the included .iso to a disk and then started the download of
DSL expecting Puppy to be too lightweight to do more than amuse me while I
waited.

Inserting Puppy into the drive (that will look good on Google when a search
for 'puppy' is done!) I was amazed by how fast the live install loaded, its
boot flexibilty, and - after my efforts to get a workable GUI in 800Mb - how
they had managed the same task in 50Mb! I even had 43Mb of the 96Mb of Ram
free!

Now to find if the drive could be seen:

# fdisk /dev/hda

Success! (Well a minor skirmish now won - the main battle is still ahead -
we have to repartition it and bring it back from the dead.)

The p command to see how the disk is partitioned. One NTFS partition.

d command to delete the partition.

Now fdisk doesn't actually make any changes until you are happy about
everything and explicitly tell it to do so. This means it is safe to 'poke
around' on your disk with it and learn how the partitioning works. This is
particularly informative for Linux as you may have a few partitions for even
a straighforward install. Mandrake has put six partitions on. The 'other OS'
will happily install in one gigantic partition - it runs into problems if a
partition proves to be not enough  for its very precise location of
particular data - it is often easiest in this circumstance to wipe down,
repartition and spend the next week re-installing everything.

So at this point we can 'q' - quit and not save changes, or 'w' - write the
changes and exit.

w it is - after all the disk isn't working anyway so what have we to lose?

Re-installing Mandrake 8.0 (remember in science at school they taught you
not to change too many variables at once? - no I thought you wouldn't
remember that, for some reason the science lessons seem to be the ones
people disremember the soonest.

I went for everything - well not all the different language versions of the
documentation and dictionaries and the Kanja bits of X. After all how much
can two 600Mb CD's expand to - unlikely (English euphemistic understatement)
they'll reach 80Gb.

The install went OK, and they didn't expand to fill the disk. In fact just
under 3Gb of my disk is filled - I have about 77Gb of free space to do
something with - I am ready for when Linux becomes as bloated as the 'other
OS'. (An after-thought - maybe I can fit about 8 or more different flavours
of Linux on here and 'dual' boot? Mmmm.)

My conscience struck me. I had left a broken man surviving in 20Gb with the
'other OS'. I rang the donor to offer to swap the 80Gb for his 20Gb. (Was it
the need to gloat?) He said it was alright - he would survive, after all the
tablets were making him very happy about life. He then wavered, the thoughts
of 60Gb of space to expand into started to cause him to think of renewing
the attempt. But no, he stood firm, he would be happy in the 20Gb. I am sure
the nurse holding the phone to his ear smiled approval - he was now well on
the way to recovery.

So the next task is to set up the system to act as a server the same manner
as the 800Mb disk. In the meantime it takes two minutes to unscrew the panel
and to replace the 815Mb drive and get it up and working as before.

I cut the DSL .iso to disk, but haven't got round to trying it yet. However,
I will be putting Puppy near the top of my list of diagnostic and repair
tools and can certainly recommend that 'Puppy is not just for Christmas'.

See you all at the meeting tonight.

Martin