November 2009 Archives

A list, in no particular order:

1. The rude ass in front of my and to the left who had his cell phone out a bunch during the first half of the movie. I don't care if you're texting or checking your email or whatever, but hide the bright white screen so it's not shining in my eye while I'm trying to enjoy the world blowing up.
   
2. The maybe crying, maybe laughing, maybe just heavy breathing woman to my right. Honestly, I have no idea why she was making so much noise.
   
3. The noisy, chatty, moving around, going out to refill their popcorn and pop, rude ass little high school brats in front of me. For all I know they were having sex with all the rustling around they were doing.
   
4. Commenty mc-chatterson behind me. Not enough to deserve a comment or look, but enough to annoy the hell out of me.
   
5. Pre-bagged popcorn. Really, if I'm paying what they charge for popcorn and butter I want my popcorn well mixed with the butter, not for you (pimply cashier kid who you can tell doesn't give a shit) to get a bag of popcorn already full, drizzle a bit of butter over the top, and give it to me.
   

Oh the movie? Oh it was fine actually, the world blowing up with great special effects, and a minimal of that silly character development stuff (actually it did have some pretty good characters in it) made it a fun ride.

The rest of the experience however, aims to make me want to justify a big screen TV and blue-ray plwyer so I don't have to deal with the other humans in the movie theaters as much.

So this morning I woke up and my first generation Drobo was acting funny. I rebooted it, and long story short when it came back it looks like the first 2TB partition, where all my data was stored, was gone, currupted, nuked, or otherwise unavailable. All my music, tagged over a period of months. All my videos, collected over years, and my collection of "classics" I've been making sure I get so that they are safe. All 13 seasons of Top Gear. All 40+ years of Doctor Who. All. Gone.

I've emailed off to Data Robotics, and I will gladly pay them the $100 (or hell, $500) support license I decided not to renew last year (because of course everything was going fine) if they can magically get it back for me.

Of course, if it does come back, will I now be able to trust the device? Or will I have to build a new system with another wack of disk space to act as a backup for that (blah blah best practices of course blah blah)? Or should I just dump the $1000+ worth of computer hardware and build another Linux box with RAID5 or buy a Windows Home Server box that does similar things.

I hate computers. Especially now as the Drobo was something that was rock solid and had had zero issues in the time I've had it. Data Robitics, or Cali Lewis, help me, you're my only hope!

Seriously, this is completely bummed me out.

Update: After a few back and forths with Valorie at Data Robitics, and the end result of this being "just run the disk utillity", plus running a couple of other mac data recovery bits, the Drobo seems to have righted itself somehow. It told me first it couldn't recover anything, but after a bit more mucking around I suddenly noticed a "Storage1" (the name of the partition) sitting on my desktop. Drilling into it I could see my data, and drilling down farther I could (wait for it!) access my data!

Yay!

So now I'm frantically backing up, though I'm not sure if this really needs a backup or not. I'm also going to be picking up a 1 or 2 TB secondary backup tomorrow to have a backup for my backup, just in case. However, my data, my precious data appears (so far) be be alive. The backup is going to take about 5 hours it says, so we'll see if it makes it through that without incident.

Yay!

A bit ago I got an almost-free computer from work with a couple of parts I wanted to upgrade my home system, bumping the CPU a bit and replacing the video card that goes WRRRAAAAAAWWWRRRRRRR-ER-ER-ER WRRRRRAAAAAWWWWRRRR with something a little quieter. Last night I finally got around to switching the parts, and found a couple of issues moving from the nVidia TI-4200 video card to an ATI Radeon 9250, so I figured I'd document it as an excuse to get something on this page so it doesn't completely stagnate.

First of all, I did it completely wrong, and simply shut down the system, swapped the video cards and booted it up. The graphics, which were configured for the nVidia card completely failed when booting up, giving me just a flashing console as it tried to run X11 with a driver for a card that wasn't installed at all.

I was lucky and had a computer next to me that I could ssh into the linux system and do maintenance remotely, however if you don't have this, read this to find out how to edit the GRUB config on boot to enter single user mode.

To recover the video, the first step was to remove that customization from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I have no idea why I had device specific configuration in there, as the last couple of Ubuntu releases have required only a skeleton file and will figure out your video cards for you. So the section I had at the bottom which looked like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

was removed.

Next I removed the nvidia packages I had installed:

$ dpkg -l | grep nvidia | grep ii
[list of packages, for me they were the "173" version, you might have different ones]
$ sudo apt-get remove nvidia-settings nvidia-glx-173 nvidia-common nvidia-173-kernel-source


And then install the non-free, evil, binary only packages for the ATI drivers (in theory I could have rebooted, let the system boot up with the default video drivers and install the restricted drivers from the 'hardware' application under the system configuration menu).


$ sudo apt-get install fglrx-kernel-source xorg-driver-fglrx


Packages install, reboot, and voila, the system should boot up as normal.