The HP desktop has a copy of Mandriva I'd used for some development work some years ago. Sadly, it no longer books Mandriva with a disk error. Step one is to get Mandriva going again and check what's on the disk drives.
- Made a Ubuntu 10.04 bootable CD.
- Booted HP machine with it.
- Ran disk utility and found error in one of the partitions.
- Ran gparted to repair file system.
- Rebooted
- Mandriva now boots OK
Next problem is that I no longer remember the password! Step two, figure out what the password is and login to Mandriva.
- Bit of searching found http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-tutorials-howtos-reference-material/54418-howto-recover-reset-root-password.html and http://www.linuxclues.com/articles/11.htm.
- Not sure what boot manager is installed and after trying ctrl-x and e found that esc got me to a 'boot' prompt. None of that is useful to me.
- Booted ubuntu CD.
- Mounted Mandriva's boot drive.
- Found etc and edited passwd and shadow for both root and editshare.
- Rebooted.
- editshare user now has no passwd
- now set a 'root' and 'editshare' passwd
- issue with using passwd. Found this http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/passwd-user-not-known-to-the-underlying-authentication-module-83380/. Used pwconv. All is now well.
OK, now what to do re Ubuntu 10.04? Step three, look at what is on the HP mandriva install and save as appropriate.
- A 'du /home/...' showed 118GB used. That's a lot of DVDs. I'm not sure any of it is important and really don't care so I'll just trash it and install Ubuntu 10.04.
- I did discover a couple of applications that I'd like to keep so I copied them to a flash drive since dealing with creating a DVD was not clear.
- Also noticed an unusual disk partition. It looks like I was emulating a RAID array using partitions. That should mean that I can keep the Mandriva install and use the old RAID partitions for ubuntu.
Step 4, install Ubuntu 10.04.
- I've done it so often now it's easy. Chose to overwrite Mandriva.
- Reboot. It looks good.
- Reconfigure screens as I've got two monitors.
- Update software.
- Load proprietary driver and reboot.
- Change Gnome background to be lighter.
- Burn kbuntu 10.04 CD to update ubuntu with KDE desktop and some applications.
- Make sure I can still boot XP. I can so all looks OK. While I've got XP up do a system update.
- Haven't booted XP for several months. Update Norton and scan. Takes a long time. Norton wanted a reboot. So we're off to the 'lets get XP up to current rev' races. Also will need to rev up XP proper.
- MUCH MUCH MUCH XP updates. Let it run overnight.
- Tomorrow I'll make sure XP is happy then return to Ubuntu.
Meanwhile, I'm checking some old, possibly bad disk on the old compaq running Ubuntu 11.04. I noticed that I'd not finished configuring the two 160 GB drives. Step one, finish configuring the drives.
- Attempted to use gparted to clean things up. Not sure of what I'm doing. Decided to install ubuntu 10.04 from CD instead.
- Installed ubuntu 10.04. It occurs to me that ultimately I'm just going to install FreeNAS but I can check disk drives this way.
- Also noted that there isn't much space in the old Compaq chassis. Dave's old Asus desktop has a lot of space so I may move the board over and build a NAS there.
- After much confusion, call brother Art and ask about where to install second drive in file system.
- For tomorrow, finish installing second drive to make sure I know what I'm doing and begin to check other disk drives.
Meanwhile, realized that Dave's old asus desktop had a good disk drive. Turns out to be a 200GB maxtor. Since I'm trying to setup a NAS server, it should be useful. While looking at DOAD (Dave's Old Asus Desktop) I noticed that he has much more room than any of the other chassis I have and a 300W power supply.
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