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Ram Swaparound II

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and Today, I am bringing an underwhelming tale of setting up my “toy” computer. Let’s get started.

I re-scrambled the Ram between most/all of the computers under my care this week. The Linux Mint gift now has all the RAM it came with and the RAM that was originally from the Ubuntu MATE MineCraft Server. I pulled the alleged faulty RAM from the old Asus machine out of my main tower and reclaimed my own sticks. The original Asus RAM was split between itself and the Server after it was all given a BIOS level check.

Long story short, I am tired of doing about everything except shuffling sticks of RAM like a deck of cards. The amount of force required to install the things is a little disturbing when the components around the base are caving in a little more than expected. My RAM is staying where it is for now, and all the sticks appear to work.

I wanted to do just a little bit more, so I started going about installing straight Ubuntu on the old machine to turn it into my “toy” computer despite its random crashes. I have in mind practicing what I think to be dual booting with this machine, so I disconnected the old HDD and it’s RAID SSD “memory bubble.” (Please don’t ask me how that’s supposed to work. I know of about three RAID configurations, and none of them match this setup. I just know that RAID is when more than one storage device is operating in parallel to provide extra speed or redundancy, usually with matched, HDD drives.) I pulled the brand new SSD from my own tower and hooked it up instead of the old setup.

I grabbed my green USB stick with Mint on it and decided to use it for any OS install needs in the future. I put what I thought was the latest version of Ubuntu on it, restoring it to its full 8GB while doing so from when I first put Mint on it to repair the “corrupt” HDD. I connected the target computer to my secondary monitor. I booted it and… nothing. The screen wouldn’t even turn on to access its internal settings when I connected both VGA and DVI to it. It turns out the RAM in the Asus tower was in the wrong pair of slots; RAM slots are paired, and one pair is to be filled first, and I had filled in the 3rd and 4th slots by mistake.

I moved the sticks to the appropriate slots and tried again. I made it to the BIOS where I managed to convince it to boot to the Linux Install Stick. I tried to tell it to install, but it claimed there wasn’t enough space (8. something MB and there were only 8). That didn’t sound right. That’s the size of the USB stick… I ended up making my way to the live environment desktop and was confronted with Unity.

Unity? That desktop was canceled. What’s it doing on the latest… I didn’t have the latest version. What happened? The bootable USB program from the tutorial, Rufus, did request/demand I let it download a couple of extra files just because I was trying to set up a newer version of Linux than the one it seemed to come with… I poked around on the Ubuntu download site I got the ISO from, and found the latest version unavailable, and had instead gotten the latest LTS version. Long Term Support was a term I learned quickly. It turns out the actual latest version was blocked due to security concerns with the all three common CPU architectures affected. I decided to put the project off a week and see if a new build comes through.

In the meantime, my Final Question: If you use Linux, what desktop do you use?

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Ram Swaparound I

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over the results of my gift as given last week. Let’s get started.

Meltdown! Within hours, my father’s new computer crashed, citing a problem with the RAM in slot 2. I may have touched some of the gold contacts when extracting/installing it, so I hope it’s still okay, if it was okay to begin with… I reopened the Asus computer’s case to see if it really was just the RAM all along.

I carefully pulled the four sticks from my tower (16 GB total), and installed them in the Asus machine, running Civ V in a debug, zero-player mode. The test ran for so long, I let it go all night, and came down in the morning all disappointed that it had still crashed in the same way. If anyone has any ideas, do make a comment here and let me know, please. The power supply and mother board are both candidates, but they each are a little more involved and/or expensive to swap out without knowing for sure what part is at fault.

Anyway, I pulled the Asus RAM from the new arrival and gave it back half, not including the suspected bad stick. The ‘bad’ half of the RAM, I have in my own tower and ran the Civ test. I didn’t get a full system crash this time; only the game froze and not the entire computer. Other than that test, the RAM itself hasn’t given me any problems.

I would like to test all 4 sticks together in my computer, and get the 4 total sticks (2 from Ubuntu MineCraft server + 2 from Father’s Mint machine) into the Mint machine and test that. Doing both of these at once would see me sending my RAM off to the server for uptime.

Time is a bit short around the holidays, so I think I will keep this post fairly brief. Final Question: From earlier, do you have any random ideas on what might be plaguing the Asus?

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Linux for Christmas

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab. This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over how I set up a tower for my father as a Christmas gift. Let’s get started.

Seeing as I am scheduling this post for Christmas day, I can safely wright without spoilers. Remember that old PC I turned into a MineCraft server? Well I got another one and gave it the RAM from the now parted computer. To keep up appearances, I have the parted computer sitting where it has been for a while now, beside my main tower. The new machine is hiding behind a pile of clutter.

I installed the RAM before I even booted the new tower up, using my secondary monitor and a VGA cable. It detected the new RAM, and offered to do a hardware check. I figured, “Why not?” and went for it. The thing came back with a complaint of too much RAM. I tried booting to Windows, and it worked, so that’s a problem I figure I can address later.

I decided to try the Cinnamon desktop environment. I went to the stack of blank CD’s and grabbed one. The top had some stuff on it, but I didn’t think much of it; I was just testing a burn program. I burned the latest version of Linux Mint to it and washed the disk to get rid of the dirt on top… and on the bottom. The bottom of a burned CD is a little discolored when you look at it. The dirt on the bottom masked bubbles of unwritten portions of the disk, rendering it useless to me.

OK, so I try to use another disk… Linux Mint is 300 MB too big to fit on a normal CD: I had just ruined a burnable DVD… the only such DVD I had at my disposal, and it’s the first one I reached for. The LightScribe disks I have had sitting here are regular CD’s. I ended up redoing my Mint USB stick.

I charged in with enough confidence when installing the OS. I must have taken a detour when starting to install, because I ended up at a partition option screen. I backed out of there, and soon enough, I had a new Linux Mint machine. Sure, a bunch of the specific software looked different from Ubuntu MATE, but I used my skills to install Chrome, WINE (ironically named WINE Is Not an Emulator), and a few other goodies my father is likely to want, including a Glass Eye program that doesn’t natively support Linux. I had to get a .DLL file and stick it directly into the program file folder, since WINE was asking for it. Strange thing was that it was unwilling to just work when placed among other .DLL files for WINE.

On a whim, I tried installing SimCoaster, a game I enjoyed when I was younger, but only got 99% completion before my save corrupted (twice). It installed, but put up a front of ambivalence when I tried running it. The program made as if to start, but something didn’t work and it stopped without any error message or other explanation. I let it go for now before searching into the problem led to my plans being discovered. While I was setting the machine up, I grabbed my usual desktop and hid the icons and “start” bar. When I was done messing around with it, I assembled a custom wallpaper similar to the one I made for the Ubuntu machine.

This week, I decided I like to write my posts as I work. It might be a little more dramatic at times, but I should remember what is going on better. Final Question: Have you ever wrestled with WINE and won?

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Goal Checklist

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am reviewing my goals leading up to development on a robot. Let’s get started.

So far, I have a Linux machine running. That’s about it. OK, I setup a pair of  MineCraft server programs on it, and all those activities built up my skills, but now, the path forward seems a bit less linear. I’ll try to explain each skill I think I’ll need and a possible project to accompany it.

The next project I want to do is set up another Linux MineCraft server, but this time, I want to remote in and use another computer to control it.

At some point, I think at some point, I will need to look into 3D Modeling. The skill to program a shape into a virtual environment is a valuable skill with many downstream applications, like animation, renders, and 3D Printing, among others. I have a minimal amount of experience with Blender, and I hear it’s fairly well supported across many platforms and for about any job. Plus, it’s free and open-source nature fit the secondary themes I’m trying to work with. The only thing I can think of to do in terms of learning it is to find a tutorial and follow it, pure and simple.

Gazebo and ROS are programs I will need. But before I can go there, I will want to get my main tower properly dual booted. Before I can feel comfortable doing that, I want to set up Linux a few more times AND a get a regular backup going for my computer. Once those are in place, I can start toying around with a virtual robot in Gazebo with ROS before moving up to physical robots.

Manufacturing the bot is something I’m looking forward to, but it’s going to feel like grunt work to me. I want to get on to programming it, but not so fast as to be completely oblivious as to how to do it when I get there. That said, I realized I will need to develop skills in following schematics when I spotted a post on the site for my intended model last week (LINK).

Even after I get a little proficiency in those skills, I can see myself having to go through a prototype or two before I work up to a social robot I’ll be satisfied with. I feel like I should practice setting up a dual boot system before converting my main system. Final Question: What kind of things would you want to see in a finished, open-source social robot?

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Operation Intuos

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab, this is Shadow_8472, and today, I am trying to get my sister’s drawing pad to work in Gimp on Linux. Let’s get started.

I went into this project by looking for official support. None given, they only officially support Windows and Mac. But, I learned that Wacom, the company that made the Intuos is cooperative in facilitating community support.

Now, I have used the drawing tablet in Windows before using a somewhat older version of Photoshop. The basic operation, as I learned it is as follows: Draw with the tip and erase with the other end. The harder you draw, the darker the line. A variety of buttons on the side stand in for normal Shift, Alt, and Ctrl keys, as well as other functions. A touch scroll can control the brush size, zoom settings, or anything you would normally use the mouse wheel for. And it’s complete with a control panel with enough settings to discourage anyone who doesn’t want to set aside a day or two setting the thing up exactly how they want it. The term is called, “decision fatigue:” you get to a place where you have so many options that anything feels better than continuing to look.

Armed with the hypothesis I was likely to find a solution fairly quickly, I simply plugged the device in and opened Gimp. That first, glorious success when it actually drew when I put pen to pad was beautiful… until I put the eraser to the pad and that drew too. The buttons on the side of the pen seemed to register as inputs as well, but the pressure feature was a no-show. I just tested the scroll wheel and other buttons, and they don’t seem do do anything useful. The scroll pad just seems to center the picture vertically and the function change button seems to just blink the mouse pointer.

Looking into the correct drivers is proving a challenge. I still don’t fully understand the situation, and I have found old support forums seem to go stale after more than a few years as software is maintained. One old forum directed me to a particular package to download, but apt-get stopped me as there were dependencies that couldn’t be resolved.

I did a little more research, and it looks like support for my version of Linux isn’t as easy as I would have hoped. A two year old Ubuntu MATE forum post broke the discouraging news. I will need to look into finding what distribution is going to be the easiest to work with this… less than standard input device if I want to avoid a year or two of learning how to write my own driver for it.

***

A new hope spot: My entire situation has more than just the OS in between user and brushstrokes.  Maybe the tablet is already fully supported but not properly configured. If so, Gimp just needs to be told what to do.

***

I found a command to run in the terminal to list the “devices” associated with the tablet, but it could be the “devices” supported by a particular driver for it. Either way, my current thoughts are that the tablet is supported, just incorrectly configured.

***

http://lifeofageekadmin.com/configuring-wacom-tablet-for-use-on-gimp-2-8/

I found this tutorial on how to get Gimp and the Intuos to play nice, and it happens to be on a distro of Linux, Fedora in this case. I won’t say the tablet is 100% functional, but I’d say it’s well on its way. I was able to draw in Gimp using the varying pressure, erase with the eraser, and I think the scroll wheel switched tools. I’ve heard of additional software to make it work fully, but I’m happy with it for now.

This week, I got a lesson in looking for problems in the right places. If I had considered that Gimp wasn’t Photoshop and focused on the easier solutions first, I wouldn’t have gone around trying to install redundant/already held drivers. Final Question: When was a time you tried to fix a problem with the wrong approach?

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Ubuntu Based MineCraft

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am setting up a MineCraft server on Linux. Let’s get started.

First off, WOW! I never would have expected it. I had heard Android was a version of Linux before, but, WOW! So, Ubuntu MATE is designed to be beginner friendly and easy for Windows users to find their way around, but there are still some “cultural differences.” The first of these cultural differences I is the file system. Where Windows has their C drive, Linux might have /dev/sda/ or something else. I don’t have it figured out yet, but it apparently can let someone know what partition of what drive they are looking in. The other major difference I noticed is the Software Boutique. It looks just like a miniature version of Android’s Play Store would if it were meant for a desktop. Only now when I look it up do I find that it’s a relatively new feature.

The aforementioned Software Boutique is where you get your programs. Windows users are in the habit of going out and downloading programs from online, hopefully from a trustworthy source. If you end up with something less than honest, your virus scanner will hopefully catch it before it can do any damage.

Good Linux users are in the habit of using package managers. All I know about them so far is that they are databases of trusted software that can also keep your software up to date with spontaneous security patches and things. That brings up the other comparison, security. Windows is the big target when making viruses. Linux was designed with security in mind, and it isn’t the go to OS for most desktop users. Both factors make it less tempting to aim at Linux when building a virus. Long story short, if you maintain good habits when playing with Linux, you don’t need to run a virus scanner.

Another thing I noticed, performance. When Windows 7 was running on there, It was chugging along as if burdened by old age. Now, I’d say it’s running like a middle-aged system. It has its slowdowns, sure, but that was running two clients of MineCraft off internal graphics. I think this computer will do nicely for my purposes.

This brings me over to setting up a MineCraft server. The client was happy with OpenJDK, the free and open source version of Java. When looking through the Software Boutique, I spotted the server and grabbed that. Too bad it wasn’t as care-free as it’s resource happy counterpart, Client. So far, I have learned that I will need to assemble a .bat file to put the server files where I want them. If only I knew how to do it, I could be done in 30 seconds…. The thing about obsolete tutorials, though, I’m going to need to assemble my own instruction set.

***

OK… It looks like I am learning about bash files and the command line before I get too far.

***

I have seen things I rightfully shouldn’t know until about a year from now. Too much to rightly cover. All I wanted to do was automatically start and stop the server after startup and before shutdown respectively.

Backing up a little, I got onto a help session with another Linux user. I don’t remember his screen name, but he advised me that not all software need be downloaded from a software repository. Big enough names, like MineCraft, should be safe enough to download directly

On that note, I used Firefox to download Discord as well, and was given a package file to deal with. It was either that or a tar.gz file I wasn’t sure what to do with, even after looking up the format.

Looking up server automation techniques, I came across powerful features that, after thinking about it, might have ruined my system if I played around with them too much. I kind of felt like I was staring into an active reactor, knowing I could stick my hand in to either disrupt everything, or find out nothing happened after all. For the curious, Linux has a different Runlevel for various functions, such as boot up, shutdown, restart, single-user, etc. At this point in my exploration, I had to gather most of my information from bits and pieces from scattered around forums and the like, so I don’t have any links to share. I did come across a few terms, many of which are obviously important, yet none of which I have fully sorted out/differentiated. I’ll just be happy to get my Spigot MineCraft server running and updating, then I think I’ll call it a week; scripting can wait, I have a more hands on project for next week.

***

The Spigot server is up. It turns out it had nothing to do with packages. When I first went through the process of getting the tools to compile the server, I accidentally disregarded the file I was in. All the mess ended up on my desktop. I sent the offending files to the trash and redownloaded and recompiled in a special folder for building such files: a ‘factory’ so to speak.

***

There is still much to explore with just this one distro. After I get a little more comfortable looking at the foreign grammar that is that which is used in the Linux terminal, I’m planning on reevaluating the lazy computer. I see two likely paths for it. After redoing its thermal paste, I’m planning on moving it over to Ubuntu and leaving it running for a few days, possibly under stress test conditions. If it holds up, I will move it in as my toy desktop and my current toy desktop gets moved to a server version to run the family’s MineCraft worlds. On the other hand, If the stress test fails, I can see the computer being parted. I know its BlueRay reader is superior to my current DVD reader. The Ubuntu machine has already inherited its old screen and speakers, which were surround sound, if there was a discrete sound card. I ended up pulling the rear speakers from the setup because they were buzzing otherwise.

I learned a lot this week, and I will say: it pays to know what it is you are supposedly doing. A series of instructions may be just someone’s preference or the way things must be done. If you ever find yourself maintaining anything, go ahead and learn a little bit more about it. You might pick up a few new tricks. Final Questions: Do you play MineCraft? If so, what was the version you started playing? And do you run a server?

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A New Tower to Play With

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab. This is Shadow_8472 and today, I’m inspecting a new to the lab, quality used computer. Let’s get started.

This is going to be another progress update post. If nobody objects, I think these will end up being the defacto standard post type. Anyway, the first thing I noticed about it was the Dell name brand. From what I have read, they tend to make good Linux machines.

My plan at this moment:

  1. Boot the machine as it is.
  2. Burn a CD or DVD with an image of its hard drive.
  3. Install Ubuntu MATE.
  4. Get the system stable.
  5. MineCraft server

I expect to finish through item 3 this week. Eventually, I’d like to learn the command line and how to remote in. After I get an idea of the command line, I can see about turning it into a server version and/or find a more appropriate distro for running a MineCraft server.

***

Well, I was not expecting this…. The computer boots just fine, if I had a VGA cable (I think). My current setup is the box, a monitor running off a DVI adapted from a DisplayPort. The wireless keyboard and mouse are working fine, and sounds are coming from an on-board speaker.

The computer is booting to Win7, but it loses the monitor signal after the Windows logo disappears. Even so, I am not letting a little problem like that keep me from shutting it down correctly. There is no account password, so I hit Enter, then Alt+F4 to bring up the shutdown menu, then Enter again to confirm shutdown.

While diagnosing the problem, I had the computer booted to both Linux Mint and Safe Mode. Safe Mode was particularly annoying because I had to mash F8 to get there, while F12 brought up it’s boot menu by simply holding it. In either case, the DisplayPort worked correctly, and I’m inclined to just proceed to installing Ubuntu MATE. I don’t know yet. Maybe I will go ahead and image the drive onto a disk.

***

I really don’t think I will ever be putting Windows back on this machine. Honestly, I doubt it. The only thing I might consider saving is Access, but I’m not sure if the license follows the computer with it, or the person or organization who originally bought it. Also of note, for the past two days, every word I type in here has been underlined by the spell checker (unless it happens to have a number in it, like F8 or F12). It’s kind of annoying. I think I’m going to go straight to 3 now. The computer is booted to Ubuntu’s install drive now, and I’m eager to get started… but it’s just I get the feeling I’m crossing a one-way bridge with no return, and I don’t like that feeling. I just want someone else to be responsible for it, but that would undermine the whole point of doing it mostly on my own… I don’t know what I’d need to make a backup and I doubt I would use it anyway, so I guess It should work now.

Now that is weird… no more underlines under most new words. I don’t know what is wrong with my spell check. Nonsense words are also being cleared in clear sections. Before, I thought Firefox was punting spellcheck off to a glitchy database, but now, I’m not sure… I can only hope I can arrange for things to work out. Undo and redo seem to reevaluate the underlines. (I am so off topic…). Anyway, I’m going to just go for it.

***

This is it, I’m at the moment of decision and I just can’t cross. Maybe I can talk myself into it… I just need some support to do a clean install. Dual booting is harder to maintain, and I don’t see any reason to keep that copy of Windows around except to have the option open… I think I will wait a few hours and continue my work then.

***

I backed out. The VGA cable arrived and Windows 7 did a full boot. I told it to do whatever updates it’s going to do, then I’m making that CD and I’m giving that drive a full startover.

***

It’s done. My father did talk me into making a system image and repair disk, though. Protip: make sure your power cord is firmly connected when you try updating and someone is likely to bump the tower with a broken arm chair. I did not learn this lesson the first time, so it happened again. But the important thing is that Ubuntu MATE is now installed and running as the exclusive OS on the new server.

I think that’s enough for this week. I’d like to poke around and learn some more about setting up a proper Linux desktop. Eventually, I will be wanting to dual boot my personal system, but that can wait until later. Final Question: I did a lot of back and forth in this one. Would you rather read an end of week report, or a progress log?

P.S. Restarting Firefox took care of the spellcheck problem. I wonder how it started though…

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The Lost Post (Hard Drive Rescue Saga Continued)

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m continuing my work on the failed computer system from last week. Let’s get started.

Lesson #1 for me today: SAVE YOUR WORK WHEN YOU STAND UP! I had a 3/4 finished post waiting to be finished. I must have gotten up for something, and I later had to reboot for something covered later on. WordPress does not auto save. With that out of the way, I’ll try to recreate something resembling my lost post.

So, last week, I covered how I used Linux Mint to do a memory dump of a failing HDD (Hard Disk Drive). This week, I plugged it into my tower and checked it for errors. My copy of Windows gave it a clean bill of health. “Only 4KB of data in bad sectors,” was the worst report I got from it. 4KB is tiny, but if it includes the boot sector, I’m out of luck when trying to boot to it. My PEBKaC (just look it up, it’s funny) moment happened as I went to shut down and boot into the suspected drive.

At this point, I went into various fuzzily related details to create suspense, such as how I couldn’t find my other SATA cable or how I didn’t have the correct mounting for my case for this HDD. I yanked the unformatted SSD and connected the HDD and let it rest just outside the case. (The picture is from just now, not then.) Anyway, at one point, the drive was putting its weight on the power cable, so I started turning it over. My father cringed as I slowly rotated the box to avoid too strong of a gyroscopic effect on the spinning disks. He told me that Hard drives used to be sensitive to the orientation they were in when they were first formatted: they must not have had as good motor control for the read heads. While this is an aging HDD, it isn’t 90’s technology, the latest example cited as not being up to being turned on end.

Also of note, I stuck Ubuntu MATE on another USB thumb drive. I actually had emptied a few others as well, but I only went through with the one.

At this point, I rebooted and lost my earlier post. Now for the results.

I first tried to get into the boot order to adjust it. That didn’t help too much, but I did find the boot menu. I selected the 2TB drive available and “Windows is getting used to its new hardware,” or something to that effect. It took a while. I ended up not being there when it rebooted itself, and I had to get back into the BIOS and back and forth… I eventually pulled my main hard drive, the green one in the picture, and let the HDD at it. With nothing else in the way, it booted. To black. It’s like the login screen was stuck loading after giving me the mouse pointer. Startup repair didn’t do much for me.

At present, (the time a depicted by the picture) I have three hard drives connected to my computer. I managed to find the lost SATA cable in a drawer I’d forgotten it was stashed. The configuration of the power cables is maxed out. Sure, I might be able to use a little trickery and rerouting to fit a few more things, but the geometric shape and lack of cable elasticity is making things difficult.

***

P.S. Edit: Guess what I found after writing the final two paragraphs. Yes, the lost post in question. I need to pick a single browser for composing my posts. The only reason I even recognized it as the lost post was because it lacked the picture. I like this a little better, so I’m still using it instead of going back. At the same this post missed some stuff. Instead of merging them though, I’m just going to post it as a page and link it HERE.

P.P.S. It was a page all along.

***

The final results are in: the little Chkdsk stunt with repair stunt worked. I was able to boot the drive successfully two consecutive times. I won’t vouch for its speed or the fact that that copy of Windows somehow missed my bigger monitor, and had the audacity to call it older than the one it actually found. Jokes aside, it did say some older monitors might not automatically connect. Detect monitors didn’t find it either. I don’t really care. The problem I set out to solve is fixed, and the drive is now pulled from my system.

Final Question: I know I said I would like to do a monthly video, but at this time, I don’t know if I can keep up on the ideas. Until I get a bigger project, I will probably just make a video when I am doing something new and hardware related. What would would you like to see in such a video?

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Desktop Data Rescue

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?

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