Fitz

As described in my earlier post, I managed to get my hand-me-down Dell Dimension 8400 desktop working after a little tinkering and a lot of reading. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 and was up and running for a good week.

But, alas, my poor computer was destined for yet another crippling problem. One evening as I read the news, the cpu usage maxed out, and the computer was unresponsive. I believe Firefox was the only application open. Regardless, it was under a very light load.

After turning the computer off, I waited a few seconds, and then pushed the power button. Instead of booting from my Ubuntu partition, Grub presented me with a command line. I tried manually booting from the hard drive with no luck.

Since I’ve had success with Damn Small Linux in the past, I thought I’d try to at least mount the hard drive from the DSL live cd. Again, no luck — DSL could not mount the drive.

As my last option, I tried connecting the drive to another of the 4 SATA connectors on the motherboard. Same results.

With nothing else to do, I bought a replacement hard drive: a Western Digital 160GB SATA drive. I hurried home, thinking it would be downhill from there.

Boy was I wrong. Actually installing the hard drive was a piece of cake, but installing Ubuntu was entirely too difficult. Ubuntu refused to format the drive at all until I ran the formatter included on the Data Lifeguard Tools cd that came with the drive.

Since the included formatter assumed that I would be installing Windows, my only options for formatting the drive were NTFS and FAT. So, I chose Windows XP as my operating system and NTFS as the format. Everything appeared to work — until I tried formatting from the Ubuntu cd. It still failed when trying to format the drive.

After several iterations of running the Data Lifeguard Tools formatter followed by attempting an Ubuntu installation, it finally worked! I have no idea why, though. And, to top things off, the Ubuntu partition was created with just under 23GB. The other 137GB remain unformatted and unusable.

If anyone can offer some advice for installing to this stubborn drive, I’d sure appreciate it.