Foreign Perspectives

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB flash drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such. Even more interesting was that a) Grub loaded and b) it was able to access all the files on the disk (you can try this via Grub’s ls and cat commands eg cat (hd0,6)/boot/grub/menu.lst).

Anyway, I thought I’d have a go at reinserting the drive. No luck, but since Grub could see the drive contents I thought I’d have a go at copying off the files. Nothing doing re booting the machine via the live USB flash with the drive in. However, it booted up fine with the drive taken out which in turn opened up the option of installing Ubuntu on a USB drive. That worked just fine.

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such.

Next step was booting the system up from the USB drive that I’d just created but with the old disk attached. That worked fine too and I figured it was off to buy a new drive. Last thing software-wise worth trying was to run the Ubuntu disk-utility on the old drive which sorted out whatever was the problem with it and it’s working fine now.

So minus a day or two of messing around but plus a fully bootable Ubuntu drive and fresh backup.

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