I’ve been trying a dozen different configurations of my 2x500GB SATA drives over the past few days involving switching between ACHI/IDE/RAID in my bios (This was after trying different things to solve my problems with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx) ; After each attempt I’ve reset the bios option, booted into a live CD, deleting partitions and rewriting partition tables left on the drives.
Now, however, I’ve been sitting with a /dev/mapper/nvidia_XXXXXXX1 that seems to be impossible to kill!
Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions:
/dev/sda1:Windows File System
/dev/sda2:Linux File System
/dev/sda3:Data Partition
I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all.
Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point.
/dev/sda3 /media/Shared ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_GB.UTF-8 0 0
Then change your Dropbox location to wherever you have the folder under /media/Shared/ (or as I do and just symbolically link it to under your Home folder, This is also a good idea because Windows defaults to calling the Dropbox folder “My Dropbox” whereas in *nix its simply “Dropbox”)
Last but not least
sudo umount /dev/sda3
sudo mount /media/Shared
dropbox start
Then just enjoy the 2.5Gb of hard disk you just saved.
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13
Jul 09
Delayed Post: LENOVO ROCKS
I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible.
From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating.
About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100″ I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily.
That was on a Friday at around 4:30. By 10am Tuesday, a fresh and shiny harddrive was on my desk.
Something that I should point out is that I got this machine from Lenovo America, with no extra fancy warrenties or anything, and they STILL gave me a great quality of service. I dont want to come across as ‘glowing’ or anything, but my next machine after this is going to be a Lenovo.
My only qualm about the experience was that there is no realistic way to ‘restore to factory settings’ for a blank drive on a machine with on Disk Drive but I wanted to try out Windows 7 RC anyway and installed it from USB. But thats for a different post.