My Tryst with Humanity

Now don't go off imagining all sorts of lofty idealistic trysts..
On Wednesday, Adbul gave me the much anticipated Ubuntu Linux distribution. Much anticipated because this linux was supposed to be a breeze to install and use. It was reputed to recognize all graphics and sound at the first install without much of configuration mumbo-jumbo typically associated with other Linux Distro installs.

The install started out with no special incidents. I already had a dual boot windows 2000/Debian PC (with the sound a little broken on the debian side). So chose the debian root partition for installing the root for ubuntu also. All proceeded well until the parition table screen - here came the first dilemma - there were two options for maintaining existing partitions - 'Do not use' and 'Keep data and use paritition' - I was not sure, if 'Do not use' would leave my existing partition undisturbed or would it remove it from the table and was confused what to use. With Abdul's expert guidance via the phone managed to cross this first hurdle successfully. I had to leave it as 'Do not use'.Here I made my possible first mistake - chosing to be on he bleeding edge of linux, I chose to have ReiserFS for my root partition. Its a new file system, arguably better than ext3 or ext2.

After asking me a few more basic things, it proceeded to install everything under the sun. One good/bad thing was that there was no package selection like the ones you would typically get with other distros. After completing the initial copy of the files, it asked me what boot loader I wanted to use - the recent GRUB or the tried and tested LILO. Again, out of my desire to be always on the latest I chose grub. Now my parttion table is somewhat like this:

C Drive		/dev/hda0	My windows system parition
D Drive		/dev/hda1	NTFS
Linux Root		/dev/hda2	ReiserFS
Ext partition		/dev/hda3
	Linux Swap	/dev/hda4
	E drive	/dev/hda5	NTFS

and for installing grub in other distros, there will be an option called, install the boot loader to MBR or the first sector of the Root Partition. Here I had to give the drive name on which to install Grub - So I gave /dev/hda3(which is my linux parition,as per Grub's Naming standards - which starts from 1 compared to linux's standard 0 based) as the one to install Grub on. Now here comes the bouncer - It just said 'Unknown error in installing Grub to /dev/hda3'. Much like a M$ error message - Technically correct but useless otherwise. I still have no idea what caused it to flunk out like that. Then being the less-confident geek I am, I doubted my mathematical skills and proceeded to reinstall Grub on /dev/hda2 (because of the confusion regarding 0 based or 1 based for the partition naming) and the bloody thing installed fine on my D drive, which is a NTFS partition, which is a strict no-write for Linux (because it does not have the software yet). OK..Cool I thought and proceeded with restarting my system to continue the install towards installing the packages.

On restarting, my bootpart image for booting Linux didnot work and worse still when I chose to boot into windows, it gave the very famous 'Unable to find %SYSTEMROOT%/ntoskrnl.exe'..Please insert a system disk error. My palms started sweating and heart started palpitating more. Worse still it was before 2100 hrs and my manager was sitting behind me. Oh...Did I forget to mention that I was doing this on my work PC.. ;-)It looked like I had properly shot myself on the foot..Similar incidents have happened earlier with my work PC, but during those crises, I had my working Linux install to fall back on, from which I would take backup of all necessary data and proceed with reimaging my system with the official system base image.

Then after a strong cup of piping hot black tea, proceeded with my plan of system recovery..In between, I had to field a couple of questions from my worried manager regarding a nasty hot bug. Then I reinstalled ubuntu again and this time, installed Grub on the hard disk MasterBootRecord(MBR). Now when I proceeded to restart my PC, Thank God, it booted into linux fine, and a small flicker of happiness amidst all this tension, the graphics and sound came up the very first time.

Ok..Good, stepped out of the mess, thought I. Not so fast, boomed God. When I tried to boot into windows again, it did boot up fine but for all practical purposes my D Drive was lost beyong hope. Trying to open D: gave another useless 'help' message. Now I understood the full impact of what had happened, about 25GB of precious data gathered over the years was lost beyond hope, or so it seemed. GRUB had installed on to my D drive corrupting its intial structure. The God of our times, Google helped me find some promising leads one which actually managed to save all my data. It was the NTFS Reader which managed to read all data from my lost D drive and with some disk space on Loan from my team mate Bhushan, I managed to recover all of the data onto his PC. This piece of software is simple yet powerful, it managed to recover data and instead of correcting it insitu, it allows siphoning over the network, thus decreasing chances of any other screwups. So by 0200 hrs, I managed to move all data out, reformat my D: into NTFS and move some essential data back to my D Drive.

When the long running copy was going on I didnot sit idle - I managed to watch the 1969 Italian Job Movie(1969, being the year in which it was released, as opposed to the 2004 ripoff version). The movie starred Michael Caine - the second on of him which I have seen (first being the widly popular 'Blame it on Rio'). A nice movie, relying more on the histrionic talents of the actors rather than the technical wizardry, more common in recent movies.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, sums up my tryst with humanity (It seems, Ubuntu means 'Humanity to Others'). In course of trying to post this, I encountered another nasty DNS resolving issue related to Windoze...but I'll save it for later.