My laptop’s more responsive and web pages seem to render so much quicker now. YouTube videos don’t stutter. Scrolling is smooth. All great.
Have I installed Windows 7? Nope, I’m just messing in XP.
I can’t believe how badly upgrading to Jaunty Jackelope has crippled my Ubuntu install. With the exception of the time taken to get to a useable desktop, Ubuntu on the whole is now slower in use than Windows – predominantly as I spend a lot of my time within a web browser.
The only real issue I have with XP right now, aside from the above, is that for some reason it just won’t connect wirelessly to our new router. This, obviously, is a bit of a bummer. I’ve had issues getting it to connect to some wifi signals while I’ve been travelling, to be fair. Ubuntu works with some, Windows with some, both with some. Sod’s law we get a router my XP install won’t work with. Strange as my dad’s laptop connects fine. I guess it’s driver/hardware-related.
Still. I can’t get over how smooth XP feels compared to Ubuntu. That’s just wrong. Example: I’m typing in a box on my WordPress install to post this blog entry. Under Ubuntu if I hit “backspace“, it pauses. If I hold the key down, I can expect a pause of a few seconds before I gain control of my machine again with a random chunk of characters deleted. Under XP it’s realtime. I hold “backspace” and I watch the characters being gobbled up.
I’ve been randomly offline a lot over the last few days. Partially because I’ve been visiting friends and family, partially as I’ve been migrating hard drives in my laptop. Again.
Currently I run Windows XP and UbuntuJaunty Jackalope (9.04) – predominantly the latter, though I keep the former around for a couple of utilities and for checking things when I’m doing support. I’ve also decided I want to install the Windows 7 release candidate I downloaded. However, disc space wouldn’t let me do that without ditching one of the other OS‘s so I turned to Amazon and ordered a 160Gb ATA drive (the largest available in 2.5″ format, I think) and an external caddy into which to place the soon-to-be-spare 120Gb device.
The procedure should be simple with the right tools:
Use some partition software to increase the size of data partition, leaving space for Windows 7 install
Remove 120Gb and swap it with the 160Gb which becomes my internal drive
Of course, these are computers. So it wasn’t going to go smoothly. Especially with the mixed operating systems.
First up, the hard drive enclosure I bought didn’t seem to like the 160Gb drive. If I connected it under Ubuntu, it detected it fine. Windows, however, did not. It “bing”ed to say a USB device had been attached, then never let me see it. Not even through Disk Manager so it wasn’t the fact that it was empty. I couldn’t even create a partition. If I rebooted the machine while the device was attached, the reboot stalled on the BIOS screen.
I disassembled another enclosure I have and tried that with more success. Reboots were fine and the drive was detected under both OSs. Hopefully the new enclosure would have more success with the older 120Gb drive I was soon to have spare.
Next step was to mirror the drive. I tried Paragon Partition Manager’s imaging (which has worked for me in the past), but it kept getting partway through and then rebooting with only a fraction of the drive copied. I began to worry about the new disc, but an attempted surface scan looked like taking 24 hours+.
Instead, I downloaded the (simple and free) Easus Disk Copy program. Burn the ISO onto a CD, reboot with the disc in the drive and away you go.
Slowly. Very slowly indeed.
The initial estimated time was around an hour. The copy eventually took a smidgen under 21 hours.
I had planned on using GParted to shift the partitions around, but it seems it’s not capable of doing this. What I needed to do was to alot roughly half of the increased 40Gb to my FAT32 data partition and leave the rest unallocated so that Win7 could use this when I installed it. So, back into XP and Partition Manager Pro for this task.
Before the repartitioning would complete, I had to run checkdisk on the two FAT32 source drives. On my copy run, it had to come up with read errors. In all, there were 200 and PMP would not continue until these were cleared.
So off I went to play Lego Batman and Guitar Here while the checks and the data migration occured. Finally I had a hard disc with everything organised as required. Phew.
Out with the old, in with the new, reboot… and a screen full of flickering “GRUB“s. No boot menu, no progress. Ah. By moving all the partitions around, I’d shafted GRUB. And possibly the MBR on the boot drive. Here’s where it got technical.
Step one was to repair the MBR and this is where having a bootable CD/DVD with your operating system on is very useful. Laptop manufacturers can burn in Hell if they don’t supply these. If you don’t have one, download it via a Torrent. You’ve paid for a license, there’s nothing wrong in having a copied disc with the software on in case you need to fix it.
Quickly boot off the Windows CD, go to the recovery console, boot into the Windows install on the C: and run one command:
fixmbr
It takes less than a second and on reboot, the PC went right into Windows. A step forward, but still no GRUB so I couldn’t access Ubuntu. Out with the 8.10 CD that I have kicking around, and into a Live session. With a terminal open, the commands to fix things weren’t too hard (thankfully).
sudo grub
root (hd0,5)
setup (hd0)
Well, it would have been nice if it were that simple. First of all, finding the correct partition to use in “root” takes a little digging.
As I’d jiggled things around, what had been (0,4) in my old setup had been changed to (0,5) – this can be discovered by running the command:
sudo fdisk -lu
Assuming you only have one Linux install, only one of these will be labelled “Linux”. Take the number “x” from the left column “/dev/sdax”.
That gave me (0,5) as I used. However, I then got an “Error 12: Invalid device requested” when running the “setup” command. A lot of digging online got me a solution to this. First “quit” out of the grub program to the command prompt again. Then:
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
At the prompt that comes up, enter “w” (no quotes) and hit return. Then repeat the grub commands listed above.
Finally:
sudo gedit /dev/sda/boot/grub/menu.lst
And ensure all the menu entries are correct. As I said, I had to change all my (0,4)s to (0,5)s.
Save, reboot, clap with glee.
Next step is to install Win7, which is tomorrow’s little job. I fully expect to have to repair GRUB again afterwards. Windows (all versions) has a habit of deciding that all other boot loaders are “wrong” and places itself before them. At least I’m expecting it!
Well the Windows 7 Release Candidate is available for download. For free. If you want it, it’s a 2.3Gb DVDISO file and available from this link to the download information page. You’ll need a MicrosoftLive ID of some description, if you don’t already have one. Your free license key is linked to this ID so if you lose the key, it’s easy to get it back again.
As my copy trickles down at a meg a second (!), I’m sat waiting for some kit I ordered yesterday – a 160Gb internal IDE hard drive for my laptop and an external drive enclosure into which I’ll put the soon-to-be-replaced 120Gb drive I’m taking out. Sadly it looks like 160Gb is the largest drive I can get for my laptop due to IDE/ATA being superceded by SATA drives.
Still, the extra 40Gb will be enough space for another partition big enough for Win7 testing. Yes I know I don’t like Microsoft as such, but I still maintain that XP was excellent… up to a point. That point, generally, was about a year of hard use and application installs – and failed uninstalls. The chaff left behind by badly-written apps (and Windows updates) is the biggest problem faced by XP as it slows the system down incredibly and without a lot of forethough and know-how can drag system performance right down.
It’s one reason I prefer Ubuntu right now. It seems to do a much better job of getting rid of this bumph, even going so far as to clearing the /tmp (temp) folder every reboot. In fact, it deletes files on-the-go as it determines you no longer need them, such as if you close the web page that YouTube video’s on. Windows, as far as XP – I can’t comment on Vista as I’ve avoided it deliberately – didn’t seem to understand the definition of the term “temporary”…
Anyway, in a couple of days I should have the equipment I need to mirror my existing drive, add a partition and install the Release Candidate. I guess we’ll find out in a few weeks if I reckon it’s a worthy successor to XP.
This may seem like old news to someone who’s stayed in the loop (I hadn’t), but as of June 30th 2008 – officially – Outlook Express users could no longer access their email via Outlook Express. Instead, Microsoft decided to force everyone to download their newer Windows Live Mail program (an edition of which was included with Vista from the start).
I don’t know the reasoning behind this other than the branding exercise whereby MS have tried to tie together all their online packages – the toolbar, MSN, Messenger, Mail and so on. Simply, it just makes things complicated for the very casual user when their email stopped working for no apparent reason.
Which is what happened to a friend today. Almost a year after the cut-off date that they knew nothing about. On their work’s email.
Yes, I know having your work email on a freebie service like Hotmail (or is it Live Mail these days?) isn’t ideal but that’s what they’d gone with and it worked for them. As I said, until today when they could receive mail but sending it gave a “host not found” error. Strange as manually entering the host address into Firefox resolved it no problem.
The solution to the issue is simple – download Windows Live Mail from this link and install it. Make sure you un-tick all the boxes for the other stuff you might not want (there are six or seven packages listed) and let the install run. Once it’s in, give it your Hotmail login details and then allow it to search for your Outlook Express installation. It’ll pull in all your contacts, folders and email. Then ditch OE.
Simple, easy… and pointless. Also surprising, given that the official cut-off date was almost a year ago. I guess it’s just one of those things that’s taken time to propagate across the servers.
But, really – making people change program not just have an upgrade?
An ISO image is a single file that images an entire (usually optical) disc – a CD or a DVD. They’re often used for software distributions or archives. Most CD authoring programs will happily accept them and burn them to disc – Ubuntu can even do this by simply right-clicking the file.
However, what happens if you just want a couple of files off the disc? Or haven’t got a spare blank?
It’s possible to mount the discs as virtual images, and navigate them as if they were sat in your CD drive – only far faster as you’re puttering about on your hard drive. You can also mount several of these at one time, rather like having many CD drives with discs in all attached to your PC at once. As long as you have the hard drive space to store these images (and that’s not a problem these days) it’s a great way to access data.
Now, in Windows there’s a great little tool for mounting an unmounting virtual drives which Microsoft dishes out for free. Why it’s not built into Windows (XP at least) I don’t know, but it’s only a tiny download and install. Don’t even think about trying to search for it on Microsoft’s download site – I couldn’t find it using the search box, though I think you may have some luck via the knowledge base. Just click here for version 2.1 for XP. If you’re using Vista, remove it and replace it with XP or Ubuntu. Trust me, your computer will thank you.
Under Ubuntu there are a few options. There’s the fancy-dan graphics version which involves manually creating mount points for future use… and the dead-simple right-click and mount ad-hoc version.
The former can be achieved with GMount ISO. Just use the apps manager or “sudo apt-get install gmountiso” at the command prompt. I did have a tinker with this the other day and it’s a nice front-end, but does involve some setup before you can get it to work.
I found the Nautilus Script from MundoGeek a lot simpler and effective. Install it, log out and back into Ubuntu and you’ll find a nice right-click context-sensitive option available to “Mount image”. To unmount you have to ensure you right click the original ISO image you mounted, and not the virtual mounted device itself. Other than that, no configuration.
Oh, and don’t forget in Ubuntu you can also mount ZIP and other archive files as virtual drives with a simple right-click. This makes manipulating files within them so much easier.
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