Good Morning from my Robotics Lab, this is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over my first trot into actually using Linux for something. Let’s get started.
So, my family’s main computer is an aging system. This week, it decided to just not work anymore. Taking an opportunity to exercise my skills, I went ahead and emptied a USB thumb drive and started learning. And by learning, I mean failing and researching why things kept going wrong.
I started by considering the problem. I had heard Linux Mint is supposed to be stable. I used Chrome to surf over to linuxmint.com and went to downloads. I was confronted with four desktop environments. I went with MATE, as I had heard nothing to do with with Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. The next page gave way too many options in terms of mirrors to download from. I tried out two different links; the first mirror estimated almost an hour, and the second one, just five minutes. Another five minutes were spent moving the ISO file I had just downloaded over to the drive I had waiting (I still do not fully ISO yet, just that it is some sort of disk image).
After looking up a tutorial on setting up the bootable hard drive, I moved the ISO back to the downloads folder and formatted the drive. I followed the instructions and, soon enough, had a stick that was supposed to work. I prayed a silent thank-you prayer after the boot order was overridden in the BIOS and I saw Mint working for the first time.
Next step in the plan: get into the failed hard drive and dump everything to a new drive. Oops. Newer versions of Windows like to hibernate themselves instead of actually shutting down. Linux gave me a super long error message informing me about something like this happening. The proper fix would be to get into Windows and disable it from merely hibernating – not an option here. Another look at that error message hinted to trying to mount the drive as read only. I went to the command line and had no idea where to start. It was getting late, so I messaged a friend; he linked me to a forum post for my exact problem.
The fix worked beautifully. I connected an external drive and compared the used space on the bad drive to the empty space on the backup drive. I was pleasantly surprised to find enough space. I set the system to doing a dump and left it overnight.
Somehow, the system held up long enough to finish the dump. I was thrilled when the last of the data was saved. My father told me I had helped diagnose the cause of the crashes; he was thinking it was a blunder with the thermal paste for the CPU and cooling system. Of course, it went and crashed again shortly after.
The old system has been replaced. I’m waiting to do a checkdisk on the failed drive using my tower, and I think I can safely say my next post will be on tinkering with the old system.
Final Question: Up until now, I have only been studying up on Linux, taking it slowly, getting ready to do something while waiting for a computer I can brush off and start over on if I ruin things completely. Now that I have an available workspace, I find myself reaching for results using tutorials. Do you learn better by first doing, then learning what you are supposedly doing; or learn what you should do first, then do it?