The Great Hard Disk Disaster of December 2009

This note has been up on my facebook profile for some time, now I am sharing it with the world.

Well OK, so first of all I am to blame of not having an up-to-date backup. The last one I did was somewhere around Feb 2009.

All my recent precious photos and videos were on my office laptop, an HP 2510p.

Last week, the hard disk suddenly crashed without prior warning. The laptop won't boot. So I booted it kwith an Ubuntu Live CD and saw that although the hard disk was failing, it could still be accessed. This was when I was in Delhi.

After I returned to Mumbai, I tried to reboot with Ubuntu and recover files. First problem, the files could not be copied although they seemed they were there. Likely NTFS table corruption.

I looked up tools for data recovery with Linux and found gddrescue. I managed to download it somehow in a temporary boot environment on Ubuntu through the office proxy. Before this, I had to wait over the weekend because the only portable backup drive available in the office was traveling.

Now with the 320GB backup drive available, which had about 160 GB used on a FAT partition, I sat down for recovery. gddrescue helps you make images of corrupt disks that you can then attempt to repair with fsck, and then either extract files from there with 7-zip or other tools, or write to a healthy disk. Easy stuff.

No. Biga problem. The FAT drive has a maximum single file size of 4GB, while the two images of my two partitions had to be 60GB each! I had no option but to format the 320GB drive to an ext3 filesystem.

So I proceeded to do it, first by asking our IT support to backup our existing backups on some idle PCs. This took several hours. I had assumed that the other data on this drive had already been backed up by another colleague the same day on his personal 1TB drive.

So I proceeded with deleting its FAT partition with palimpsest, a Ubuntu utility, while trying to confirm over phone that it was safe to do so. DISASTER!

My colleaue called back and said he had indeed NOT backed up the critical and confidential data on the drive, for which there was no other copy!

I was dead. Then my ghost remembered reading earlier in the day there was hope in the form of gpart, another linux utility. So it downloaded gpart to the temporary Ubuntu environment, and proceeded with running it.

The good side: gpart tries to guess a deleted partition table on the basis of existent data on the drive. I had not overwritten anything, so the data must still be there. The bad part: the only documentation related to gpart is how its command syntax works.

My ghost made two aborted attempts of rewriting the partition table. Then it realized it had nothing more left to lose in going with the most likely default options, and ploughed in.

Magic! The original partition of the backup drive was restored, and was accessible. The spirit re-entered my mortal remains.

I then proceeded to backup the critical data on my replacement laptop's drive, only to find it was a mammoth 96GB, because most of it was movies and 'other stuff'. Yes, but there certainly was other confidential data that had to be preserved.

So I asked by keeper of the backup to please back it up to his personal 1TB drive and I would collect it the next day. By this time, curiously, I could not access the CD drive from which Ubuntu live was running on my original laptop.

The next evening I collected the now-formattable 320GB drive, and brought it home along with the old and new laptops to attempt a rescue.

The reason I was doing this? HP only provides a drive replacement. The HD cable connector on the 2510p is so odd you can't connect the HD to to any other computer as slave. The only third party that was promising to recover data was asking for a whopping Rs.25,000 ($525)!

But now I was all set, with three computers, an internet connection, a backup drive, some flash memory and the Ubuntu CD. Or so I thought.

Now the damned old laptop wouldn't just boot from the CD! It stopped saying the HD was about to fail, and just reported an error. Actually neither the CD nor the hard disk could be found in the boot menu. Hmm, weird.

So now it was time for a deeper adventure into Geekland. I decided to find a way to copy Ubuntu to my 2GB flash drive, make it bootable and try it instead of the CD.

I started the new laptop, which had little to offer for creating disc images from its pathetic Windows XP environment. I had googled and found pendrivelinux.com, which provided both Linux and Windows utilities for creating a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB flash drive. The problem, it needed an Ubuntu ISO image, which had to be downloaded. No Way! I HAD to create it from the CD.

I googled a bit more and found cd2iso, a small free uncomplicated program to make ISO images out of CDs. The Roxio crap bundled with the laptop makes .IMG files.

So proceed to download and run cd2iso from softpedia.com. Success i ripping the CD to ISO. But where the hell is the image! A folder search on windows found it in program files, in the cd2iso directory. The program is so small they didn't bother to add a save as- dialog.

Hmm, back to the USB utility. Format the flash drive after a backup. Run installer script, qualified success with only 14 data reading errors from the ISO.

Plug USB stick in laptop. Recheck boot sequence options. Reboot. It worked! Ubuntu was up and running, with the added advantage of the USB flash drive that my changes were permanent.

Try getting synaptic to install gddrescue, but first, configure wireless connection. After some frustrating problems, remember I have to add DNS servers manually in network options. Done. Installed.

BUT. And a very BIG BUT, where the hell is the hard disk! Where the goddamned hell is my CD drive! Both have stopped being detected at all!

Numerous reboots and permutations and combination, temptation to pray to a non-existent God, but to no avail.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am now stuck like a lost traveler on an inhospitable planet. All my tools are now polished, sharpened and ready. Only, I no longer seem to have the material on which to use them.

What will I do?

NOTE: The data was never recovered. The agency that busted a new hard disk to swap the spindle said no data could be read.

I have since bought a 1TB Seagate external hard disk. It costs around Rs.6,000/-

IDBI Bank does not support Firefox. Security reasons!

Like, man, this is absurd. This is stupid. This is awful. Date and time of attempt: 19 February 2008, 1827 hrs IST.

Click to expand.

Has somebody bought their web developer off? Who taught him Engrish? Your shure Activex is a better scoorty in browser?

EDIT: Some months, probably a year later, the IDBI Bank website started to work with Firefox. Perhaps they changed their admin.

Subsistence or knowledge? Get it right

Here's a blog entry about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child project) XO - J5's blog. What impressed me more was this comment by Giacomo, reproduced hereunder without permission:

This post is the best answer to all those who criticized this project because you should’ve spent the money in food and medical aids instead of laptops.
Those children don’t eat grass nor drink muddy water from a well 10 km away from their homes.
Their experience is not so different from the experience of my mother in the ’50s here in Italy, there were jobs, homes, the basic services were guaranteed, but there wasn’t too much money for the rest.
This project can bring to those children what otherwise they’re going to miss the most in this century: knowledge and access to the rest of the world.

People have been criticizing the OLPC and similarly-motivated projects on cynical premises such as there being a greater need to provide access to safe drinking water, or food, or employment, or medicines. However, I do not know if these very people ever participated in any project or donated to it that provided these very means, leave alone knowledge.

It may be said that the poor are poor because they are trapped in a vicious circle and they do not have any means to break it. I will say that access to knowledge provides them a means to break this circle by showing them that an alternative future exists and by showing them a path to reach it.

The OLPC can open up poor and rural children's horizons, and it need not necessarily be an option to safe water, food or health care. Rather than these, money spent on an OLPC can easily be tracked to its end use. The OLPC can be a force multiplier by sowing the seed of a quest for knowledge in these children. It can go beyond the results demonstrated by the Hole In the Wall project.

It is a pity that India has rejected the OLPC, and although there was a lot of hype about the simputer, it never got more than a honorary mention in the media.

Suzlon REpower AREVA

Suzlon and AREVA are locked in a battle in the German financial market for the takeover of REpower, the third largest wind turbine manufacturer in Germany.

Testing Google blog alerts.

The return of

When life hands you lemons, make squash. A rusty old cliché, but how true!

I am back after a long, long time...what have I been up to?

1. I was trying to get my career on track. I was looking for a new job and was ready for big changes. Suddenly, things took a change for better (I hope this stays true in the long term), so I am now doing something I have come to enjoy, that too in a familiar environment, but in The city.

2. Fiddling with Linux. I am on Fedora Core 6 now - a forced choice, as a bad Mandriva 2007 DVD from Linux For You magazine ruined my working installation. I managed to get a replacement, but had grown to again get comfy with FC6. Better, I had already figured out through lots of trial and error and some help from the community how to connect to VSNL broadband. So I now have a multimedia-capable (!) installation of FC6. My only complaint is that VLC (0.8.6a) on FC6 is horrible for playing movies: the sound output is unbearably choppy. Perhaps this has to do with optimization parameters in the FC6 kernel.

3. I was fed up with the high price and low volume of VSNL broadband, so I managed, with ample help from my father, to get a BSNL broadband connection, and blindly bought the Netgear DG632 ADSL router/modem/firewall. Again, after lots of heartburn (I did not request the engineer to install it) I managed to get it working, first on Windows XP.

4. Lastly, the new broadband connection did not seem to work with FC6. After reinventing the wheel again and again, I have learnt that the problem only arises when I use Firefox (and Yum). Konqueror and the shell can see the connection fine, and use it without problems. However, when Firefox only accepts IP addresses, and not URLs. Something must be wrong with the DNS configuration. Yum also doesn't work, from the shell or through Yumex. So more research is called for. Oh, how I love Linux. I now live in the constant fear of not knowing what to do once I have a perfectly functioning system.

5. I have of late been very busy with my new work profile - talking to investors, analysts etc. I hope to improve my diction and presentation skills very soon - I need to, actually. I got a Lenovo R60 laptop from the company, plus a CDMA data card. The darn thing is heavy as rock, but has really good specs. It's a pity I cannot install Linux on it.

6. I read somewhere on the fora that one user was facing a problem similar to mine with Fedora and router-based connections, but when he popped in a Knoppix live cd, the connection worked flawlessly. I have the Knoppix 5.1x live DVD, and I tried it too. It is TRUE!

I have some scores that I need to settle, but before that, I need to get my tax planning in order and recover my outstanding tour expenses. I am out of money by thousands now.

And just for the record, I hate VSNL. I registered a domain with them, but they did not give me enough options/tools to configure it for use with Google Apps. So I bought web hosting from them, but they aren't still providing the required options. Wait, the best is yet to come. I did this a month ago. VSNL still hasn't been able to make my website (actually, just an under-construction page) operational.

Their call centre-based help is pathetic, and the executives are unable to escalate my call. I have asked them for a refund, but they say it cannot be done, which I don't understand. OK, domain name registrations cannot be undone, so that money is gone down the drain, but what about web hosting? It is just a service, and it has not been rendered to any measure of satisfaction. In the mean time, Google has withdrawn the App service offered to me.

I am taking VSNL to consumer court. I will make them change their ways.

The magic has run out

Imagine, right after my previous post, I was again disconnected.

It means I will again have to run around debugging, and trying all permutations and combinations, and trying them again.

Einstein (I think) once said, madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Or something like that.

By the way, once you have Linux fully configured and running with all the bells and whistles you wanted, what do you do? What comes next?

I have done something I haven't tried in a long time - sticking to a distro. I am still (happily) with Mandriva 2006. I have a Fedora Core 5 DVD, I have given away Ubunty Breezy Badger CDs (four sets plus one single CD), I have passed up Suse OpenLinux 10.1, and a Debian Sarge DVD. I am expecting to be the recipient of Mr. Shuttleworth's kindness, the latest Ubuntu CDs soon. The question is, will I ever try them?

My next quest is to get a 3D accelerator card - one that runs with open drivers on Linux, of course. Once I move my butt and buy something, I will install a good distribution with XGL and all that shiny shit. Currently, my Intel 865 board creeps with OpenGL. Oh, and I plan to double my 256 MB RAM.


Hey, I want somebody to tell me why installing software on any RedHat like system, with RPMs, tends to slow down the computer so horribly, if you do it from the GUI. There isn't too much of a performance problem if you go $ rpm -ivh xxx_aa-nn.rpm from a shell, but man, does it progressively deteriorate the system if you use a GUI package manager! Is there some tweak that I need to perform?

Tata Indicom Broadband is....weird!

Heh! Imagine my posting this after a full month of getting my connection! I am finally posting this from GNU/Linux

It was the same old story all over again. I thought I had clinched it, and using my connection with Linux would be a very easy task, but I was Wrong. Tata Indicom, like many other broadband service providers, uses PPPOE (Point to Point Protocol Over Ethernet), which means that it sells the very line it has sold to you many times over. Sarcasm apart, it goes like this:

I have installed a lan card (ethernet card) to which Tata have connected their LAN (WAN) cable. I am now part of an always-on network. I use a connection manager, which acts like a dial-up connection dialer (ahem), which helps me to log on to the broadband service. This method of using PPP over the ethernet, instead of a dial-up network, is PPPOE, where the PPP packets are encapsulated within standard-sized ethernet frames. Thus, the ISP has perfect control over authorising who connects, how much data passes through the connection. In itself, it is a cumbersome mechanism, but looks easy on Windows as usually people tend to design the protocols and frontends for the dominant OS.

On Linux, it is the exact opposite of easy. First, Tata Indicom doesn't 'support Linux', which means they won't (usually) help you configure your connection, or most of the time, even offer help over the phone.

Rather than go for a ball-by-ball commentary, I will just post the things I know:

1. On Windows, the Tata Indicom Broadband Manager loads a virtual Tata Indicom Broadband Adapter, which is actually a proprietary protocol developed by one Divinet Technologies of Pune. No mention of Linux support anywhere.
2. You connect with the Broadband Manager, which is basically a command to invoke a network connection, with the following properties: IP configuration through DHCP, and two DNS server addresses. And, your user ID and password. Of course, the tool doesn't have a Linux version.
3. On Linux, you have to search for, and discover some PPPOE connection managers such as RP-PPPOE (www.roaringpenguin.com).
4. You need to first set up your ethernet connection to the LAN/WAN. If you are a normal subscriber, you will need DHCP. Important notice: configure your ethernet card (eth0) to work in half-duplex mode.
5. Download and install rp-pppoe. Configure it. Run it. Waste one month trying to figure out what's wrong. Read lots of documentation, downloaded from within Windows.
6. Try everything under the sun, or within your box, including webmin, drakeconf or system-config-network or ifconfig, or whathaveyou. Fail.
6. Almost give up.
7. Wake up one day and discover that the internet is on automagically. I won't give you much of a clue here.

To make a long story short, IT'S WORKING!!!

p.s.:
8. Live in the constant fear of the magic running out suddenly one day, and your being left to reinvent the wheel once more.

BRRROAADBAND!!!

I might sound like a teenager finally able to give vent to his gaming (and pr()ning) requirements, but I finally have broadband!!!

Although I am posting this from WinXP, I will be rebooting to Linux soon to try it out. Then, it's really goodbye (unless my daughter wants some specific program, and it does not run on wine, like Kea Colouring Book).

I have subscribed to VSNL Broadband, a 256 kbps plan. Well, of course, it's just there, and no more, but it's a whole lot better than dialup. More reviews will follow.

I am in a foul mood today. Something happened at the office, and I feel like I ought to step onto a rake or something. I am just hiding this from my wife, but the loving girl that she is, she will definitely sense it.

And yesterday, I had made a fool out of myself in front of the Big Guy himself. Talk about convincing oneself how big a loser one is, and one won't need much proof.