CATASTROPHIC FAILURE

[athelind]

After difficulties installing Kubuntu at all, I discovered that a) to get two monitors running, I needed to directly modifiy the XWindows configuration files -- which don't seem to have any beginner's tutorials or documentation.

But that's not the big problem, so please don't address it in the comments.

The live CD wouldn't let me access my hard drives. It gave me a response that was something like "UID 99 Not Recognized".

I shrugged, and installed anyway.

It wouldn't let me access my old 80GB -- which, you'll recall, is where I stash pretty much everything.

Making it useless to me.

Please note that the drive was MOUNTED. It just would not allow me ACCESS.

Soooo... now I've got a fresh, shiny Ubuntu-with-Gnome Live CD running.

And it doesn't recognize EITHER hard drive, at ALL. They don't show up in the file manager. Trying to "mount hda0" or "sudo mount hda0" yields "mount: can't find hda0 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab".

This sounds like a hardware problem. Especially considering all the times I had boots that didn't quite work, and a least one instance where the system simply would not START. Not not-boot -- the power button did NOTHING. No lights. Nothing.

I'm gonna see if it's something stupid-simple, like loose cables.

Otherwise, I have to conduct my whole life through this little tiny low-rez laptop screen.

Comments

[triggur.livejournal.com]

I am firmly of the opinion that Ubuntu, while ahead of the pack in a lot of ways, is still not ready for prime time in the sense of readily installing on all the platforms permutations and being easy for Joe Average to configure.

I love linux to death, but on the server, not on the desktop; the linux people are routinely bad at the "last mile" problem when it comes to this stuff.

When it's as easy for my mother to stick in the CD and have it install linux as seamlessly as she can do so with windows, I'm there. But til then... ;)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

You know what? When I installed it on my grandson's machine, it was EXACTLY that easy. The first time installed it on mine, it was, too -- other than tricky shit that would be nearly as much of a pain in Windows.

Right now, I get NOTHING when I turn it on. It doesn't even load the BIOS. Actually, at the moment, I don't even get the blue LED that says "Yay Power!"

I rather suspect that's not an OS problem.

[triggur.livejournal.com]

In this case, probably a hardware problem, yeah.

In the Effy Edge era I tried installing Ubuntu on an HP laptop and it completely failed to make the trackpad and wireless work. Then I tried to install it on my desktop machine and the installer itself blasted the screen full of graphic garbage and froze up during boot.

Maybe the more recent releases are more stable, but my last experience with desktop Ubuntu has been less than favorable. For the time being, I'll stick with running linux on my servers.

[kfops.livejournal.com]

Trying to "mount hda0" or "sudo mount hda0" yields "mount: can't find hda0 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab".

This response from the system is saying (in it's most cryptic way) that it doesn't have enough information to try and mount the drive for you.

/etc/fstab is a file that contains a list of "mount points" (this drive when mounted goes under this directory) and options such as read-only, filesystem type, and the like.

If the drive isn't listed in fstab you'll need to give it more information from the mount command, such as:
mount -t auto /dev/hd0 /mnt/foo
This command would tell it to try and automatically determine the file system (-t auto) for /dev/hd0 and mount it under the directory /mnt/foo. You need to create an empty directory /mnt/foo first, the system won't make the assumption of creating it for you.

Once you've determined what mount command works properly for you, you can edit your /etc/fstab file (though this is useless for a live CD) to get it to mount at boot-up.