I recently installed Ubuntu on a system with a slightly irregular hard drive configuration. Two SATA drives were running Windows on a mirrored (fake) RAID array, and a third SATA drive was ready to have linux installed. The Ubuntu installer recognised the drive as the third hard drive, and installed itself as expected, with Grub installed in the MBR of this drive, being first in the BIOS’ boot queue. However, all references in Grub’s menu.lst for the Ubuntu installation pointed to (hd2,0), which resulted in an “Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition.” message from Grub. The solution was simply to edit the entries to read (hd0,0) for (hd2,0) as Grub now recognised the third drive as the first on account of its place in the boot order.
Tag: Linux
There are times when I wonder how I ever survived without Knoppix as a tool for fixing PC problems on the fly. And give someone a CD and some basic instructions, and you can soon have a live terminal up ready to fix a whole host of problems. Yet I find being able to talk to the person on the other end often vital for solving problems, and more importantly, it can be a reassurance for when you make a cock up!
Normally I just install the latest version of Skype, sadly however the latest Skype 1.4 beta doesn’t work on Knoppix 5.1.1, and owing to legal issues previous versions have been pulled and replaced. Skype are prevented them hosting these prior releases, which meant I had to dig around a bit before I could find a copy of Skype 1.3, packaged for Ubuntu. Download this .deb package, and then run the usual command as root:
dpkg -i skype_debian-1.3.0.53-1_i386.deb
Voilà!
Talk about learning the hard way! Accidentally deleting files on an ext3 partition is not quite so the reversible process it was on ext2, as explained here.