Several years ago I installed Linux on a friends laptop. He moved to Kubuntu when I moved to Kubuntu.
A few months ago his wife, a long time Windows fan, asked me find out why her Windows box was not behaving right. She had taken the box to a local technician but he couldn't find any reason for the symptoms. I found a Trojan keyboard logger vector setting in her MBR. She asked me to replace Windows with Kubuntu on her laptop was on pins and needles the entire weekend, until she could go to the bank, and contact her credit card companies to change her account information.
A week ago, Oct 29th, he brought his daughter's Gateway 400SD4 laptop to my house. It was a graduation gift to his daughter, who hadn't used it in 3 years, since Windows stopped booting up on it. She wanted me to look at it and see if I could get it was worth fixing and if I could get it running.
Time is an enemy to dormant electronic equipment. The electrolyte in electrolytic capacitors can corrode their container and leak onto the mobo, corroding traces and other components. On board batteries lose their charge. LiIon batteries can lose too much of their charge and suffer damage. Resistors can lose plasticizers and change resistance values. Seals on displays and harddrives can age and crack, leaking air and moisture into the device, damaging it. Data on harddrives can undergo magnetic creep (2nd Law effects) and smear the O's and 1's, making it harder for parity checks to recover data. (dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sda can restore magnetic zones by rewriting data to itself)
When devices with large capacitors or inductors are turned on their failure can cause other, healthy components to fail ... things like transistors, leds, op amps, etc...
I turned it on. Windows XP would not boot. I hit F2 and looked at the battery and HD info. The LiIon battery was 0% charged. The HD data looked good. The BIOS date was correct, but the time was not. That particular CMOS battery supposedly had 2 years left of its shelf life. That was strong enough to toggle the data counter once a day, but not enough to toggle the timer each millisecond.
I put Kubuntu 10.4 into the CDROM and rebooted. It came up. I connected an ethernet cable from my wireless to it and clicked on the Install Icon. I gave it the entire HD and twenty minutes later I had a brand new shiny Kubuntu KDE desktop. I installed the multimedia codecs, FireFox and a few other apps. My friend and I sat there making small talk about how easy Kubuntu went onto that old computer. When I tried to move the mouse it wouldn't. The keyboard wouldn't work either. I hit the power button and rebooted. A long string of track and sector errors rolled off the screen.
Bad HD? I rebooted the LiveCD, ran hdparam and found 79 bad blocks in the last 10GB of the 40GB HD. in a console ran "fdisk -l /dev/sda". It gave an CHS setting that didn't look like what was showing in the BIOS. The capacity was 40GB alright, but C=7552000, not the 4806 value that fdisk showed. I checked the BIOS again and noticed that there was an "OS type" setting that had "DOS" in it. I toggled the value and saw "Other" as the only other option, which was for "Unix and Novell and other OSs". OK. I saved that setting, exited the BIOS and rebooted the LiveCD. I tried to reinstall but GParted couldn't successfully complete the EXT4 formatting. To avoid the last 10GB I repartitioned the HD so that /dev/sda1 was 30GB and /dev/sda2 was a 500MB swap partition. Gparted still failed in the formatting of sda1.
Fdisk was still showing the H=4806 value. I booted my floppy of DOS 6.22 and used its fdisk to repartition the HD. On reboot Gparted failed again. I then used "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" from the LiveCD to zero the entire HD. Eighteen hours later I booted the LiveCD again. GParted failed again. I used "Boot & Nuke" and started over. Using Puppy I tried partitions of:
sd1=10GB, sd2=10GB, sd3=10GB, sd4=500MB
sd1=20GB, sd2=10GB, sd3=500MB
and several others. ALL the partition attempts wrote to the HD without errors. ALL failed to format properly.
I used FreeDOS's fdisk to repartition the HD. I booted PCLinuxOS OpenBox and in its Konsole I used "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1" to clear the boot sector. I tried to install OpenBox. It failed at the conclusion of the EXT4 format.
It is now Sunday afternoon, Nov 7. I had used the entire week trying to get the HD to work, or at least part of it. I decided to force the CHS settings using cfdisk from the Puppy 5.11 LiveCD (built on Ubuntu 10.4), despite warnings it could trash the HD. What could I lose?
cfdisk -z -g -c=7552000 -h=16 -s=63
and I formatted sd1 as 30GB and sd2 as 500MB swap. The partition table wrote to the HD without errors. I put PCLinuxOS back in and rebooted.
I was going to hit the escape key and select the CDROM from the boot menu but before I could do that the HD booted almost instantly and within a few seconds I saw the Kubuntu splash screen!
THE VERY SAME installation I had completed a week ago and ran for nearly half an hour before it crashed! I was stunned. HOW could grub, the / directory, or anything on that disk survive what I put it through?
I expected none of the directories to contain files but everyone I looked at did.
I ran several applications and they all ran find. I put a CPU temperature applet and watched as the Pentium 4 CPU cycled between 129F and 150F. The Pentium 4 M CPU has a max temp of 212F.
After about 20 minutes the desktop broke and bad sector numbers started rolling down the screen. The HD was, IMO, unrecoverable.
Yesterday I booted Maveric, unmounted sda1 and sda2 and ran the LiveCD for nine hours without problems. As I mentioned elsewhere, I plugged in a DL-650G wireless PCI card and it was detected and configured immediately. After entering my ESSID and password I got a fast connection.
I am next going to see if it boot and run a USB Kubuntu.
A few months ago his wife, a long time Windows fan, asked me find out why her Windows box was not behaving right. She had taken the box to a local technician but he couldn't find any reason for the symptoms. I found a Trojan keyboard logger vector setting in her MBR. She asked me to replace Windows with Kubuntu on her laptop was on pins and needles the entire weekend, until she could go to the bank, and contact her credit card companies to change her account information.
A week ago, Oct 29th, he brought his daughter's Gateway 400SD4 laptop to my house. It was a graduation gift to his daughter, who hadn't used it in 3 years, since Windows stopped booting up on it. She wanted me to look at it and see if I could get it was worth fixing and if I could get it running.
Time is an enemy to dormant electronic equipment. The electrolyte in electrolytic capacitors can corrode their container and leak onto the mobo, corroding traces and other components. On board batteries lose their charge. LiIon batteries can lose too much of their charge and suffer damage. Resistors can lose plasticizers and change resistance values. Seals on displays and harddrives can age and crack, leaking air and moisture into the device, damaging it. Data on harddrives can undergo magnetic creep (2nd Law effects) and smear the O's and 1's, making it harder for parity checks to recover data. (dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sda can restore magnetic zones by rewriting data to itself)
When devices with large capacitors or inductors are turned on their failure can cause other, healthy components to fail ... things like transistors, leds, op amps, etc...
I turned it on. Windows XP would not boot. I hit F2 and looked at the battery and HD info. The LiIon battery was 0% charged. The HD data looked good. The BIOS date was correct, but the time was not. That particular CMOS battery supposedly had 2 years left of its shelf life. That was strong enough to toggle the data counter once a day, but not enough to toggle the timer each millisecond.
I put Kubuntu 10.4 into the CDROM and rebooted. It came up. I connected an ethernet cable from my wireless to it and clicked on the Install Icon. I gave it the entire HD and twenty minutes later I had a brand new shiny Kubuntu KDE desktop. I installed the multimedia codecs, FireFox and a few other apps. My friend and I sat there making small talk about how easy Kubuntu went onto that old computer. When I tried to move the mouse it wouldn't. The keyboard wouldn't work either. I hit the power button and rebooted. A long string of track and sector errors rolled off the screen.
Bad HD? I rebooted the LiveCD, ran hdparam and found 79 bad blocks in the last 10GB of the 40GB HD. in a console ran "fdisk -l /dev/sda". It gave an CHS setting that didn't look like what was showing in the BIOS. The capacity was 40GB alright, but C=7552000, not the 4806 value that fdisk showed. I checked the BIOS again and noticed that there was an "OS type" setting that had "DOS" in it. I toggled the value and saw "Other" as the only other option, which was for "Unix and Novell and other OSs". OK. I saved that setting, exited the BIOS and rebooted the LiveCD. I tried to reinstall but GParted couldn't successfully complete the EXT4 formatting. To avoid the last 10GB I repartitioned the HD so that /dev/sda1 was 30GB and /dev/sda2 was a 500MB swap partition. Gparted still failed in the formatting of sda1.
Fdisk was still showing the H=4806 value. I booted my floppy of DOS 6.22 and used its fdisk to repartition the HD. On reboot Gparted failed again. I then used "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" from the LiveCD to zero the entire HD. Eighteen hours later I booted the LiveCD again. GParted failed again. I used "Boot & Nuke" and started over. Using Puppy I tried partitions of:
sd1=10GB, sd2=10GB, sd3=10GB, sd4=500MB
sd1=20GB, sd2=10GB, sd3=500MB
and several others. ALL the partition attempts wrote to the HD without errors. ALL failed to format properly.
I used FreeDOS's fdisk to repartition the HD. I booted PCLinuxOS OpenBox and in its Konsole I used "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1" to clear the boot sector. I tried to install OpenBox. It failed at the conclusion of the EXT4 format.
It is now Sunday afternoon, Nov 7. I had used the entire week trying to get the HD to work, or at least part of it. I decided to force the CHS settings using cfdisk from the Puppy 5.11 LiveCD (built on Ubuntu 10.4), despite warnings it could trash the HD. What could I lose?
cfdisk -z -g -c=7552000 -h=16 -s=63
and I formatted sd1 as 30GB and sd2 as 500MB swap. The partition table wrote to the HD without errors. I put PCLinuxOS back in and rebooted.
I was going to hit the escape key and select the CDROM from the boot menu but before I could do that the HD booted almost instantly and within a few seconds I saw the Kubuntu splash screen!
THE VERY SAME installation I had completed a week ago and ran for nearly half an hour before it crashed! I was stunned. HOW could grub, the / directory, or anything on that disk survive what I put it through?I expected none of the directories to contain files but everyone I looked at did.
I ran several applications and they all ran find. I put a CPU temperature applet and watched as the Pentium 4 CPU cycled between 129F and 150F. The Pentium 4 M CPU has a max temp of 212F.
After about 20 minutes the desktop broke and bad sector numbers started rolling down the screen. The HD was, IMO, unrecoverable.
Yesterday I booted Maveric, unmounted sda1 and sda2 and ran the LiveCD for nine hours without problems. As I mentioned elsewhere, I plugged in a DL-650G wireless PCI card and it was detected and configured immediately. After entering my ESSID and password I got a fast connection.
I am next going to see if it boot and run a USB Kubuntu.
I spent at least 40 hours futzing with that old Gateway 400SD4.
and I agree with him. Putting $150 into a nearly 8 year old laptop isn't worth it. And THAT assumes that I could take it apart, replace the defective components, and it would still work after I put it back together. I gave him no guarantee on that. Even though it can run a Maverick LiveCD with a DL-650G wireless connection perfectly, it leaves only 15MB for application space. Run just about anything and it slows down to abacus speed. It's laying in the junk pile now.
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