My geekfest weekend

So how's your weekend been? Mine's been quite nice. Carla and the boys took a little trip to visit her Mom down at Coronach while I stayed home to look after the cattle and pets. So it's been quiet around here. And thanks to my sister needing work done on her laptop and Space (the Canadian sci-fi channel) showing all the Star Trek movies this weekend it's been a geekfest for me!

Saturday I sat down with the laptop in front of the TV to watch a day's worth of movies starring the original Star Trek series cast. This ailing laptop is a big HP machine. After Staples failed to fix an overheating problem my sister discovered the machine wouldn't boot anymore. Her husband cleaned it out himself but it still refused to boot. Being the 'computer guy' of the family, it often falls to me to try to fix things. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your viewpoint) I'm more of a Mac and Linux guy. I don't do Windows much.
This laptop had XP Pro installed and couldn't find "NTLDR" so I knew it was a boot problem. Now was it just Windows or the drive? I booted off the XP CD and tried to repair the master boot record and boot sector but got nowhere. Next was an attempt at a reinstall.

Now it appeared that a reinstall might work. The CD booted and began the process by copying the install files to the hard drive. Unfortunately when it came time to reboot to continue the setup the computer would reboot before Windows would finish loading. I tried this twice and got the same result. Now what...

I have a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Maybe it would work. So I boot that DVD and begin trying to install Win7. Huh...it can't even see the drive. I'm beginning to suspect the drive is screwed and order a new one online just in case.

My next try is trying to boot my Linux disks. These fail, too, but I sometimes get an error message that I search for online. I try again with a Kubuntu 7.10 disk and add the 'noapic' option to the kernel boot options and the disk boots. Well, let's try an install. It works! I get a working Linux install that boots perfectly off the hard disk! The only problem I have is I can't get wireless networking to work. I know this is an older version of Kubuntu so I setup a download of the 9.10 version and go and visit my dad up in the care home in Central Butte.

When I get back the download is done and I perform an install of Kubuntu 9.10 using the same option as before. I download packages for the wireless networking and get it and running! This is when I call it a day and just relax with my Trek movies and some Christmas goodies.

The next day I work on getting the right software packages installed so my sister can do what she needs to do with the laptop (which is really just getting Firefox installed so she can Facebook right, sis?). Using the package management software on Ubuntu machines makes software installation pretty easy. There's very little of the dependency hell we used to experience in the old days. So while I watched the TNG cast in their movies, I fine-tuned the laptop and wrote out a page of things to help my sister get up to speed with Linux.

So I'm pretty happy that I was able to fix the laptop and just as pleased that it was Linux that came to the rescue. Perhaps if I knew Windows better I might have been able to work out why Windows failed in this case but having been a Linux enthusiast since 1997 I just know it better. If the hard drive keeps running happily I'll put the replacement I ordered into an external case for backup purposes. We should probably clone the laptop drive just in case.

Anyway, that's how I spent my weekend. It made for an enjoyable weekend for a geek like me! :)