31 Jan 2001 dalke   » (Journeyer)

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate computers?

Now, don't get me wrong. I love programming. But I hate computers.

I replaced the hard drive in my computer about 1.5 months ago. It dual boots between Windows 98 and Mandrake. Why am I using Windows? Because I couldn't get the ppp connection working under Mandrake - it would stop anywhere between 1 minute and 30 minutes of use. The phone line would still be in use, but just sitting there making noise.

So I replaced the hard drive and upgraded Mandrake from 6.5 to 7.2. Thanks to the help of a friend, it went pretty smoothly, although I exlaimed "I hate computers" a few dozen times during that process.

Last Friday evening, Norton Antivirus kicked in and say the master boot record had changed and would I like to fix it. Admittedly, I didn't read the text too closely where it said "this could be caused by upgrading the OS" so I hit the "Repair" button. This replaced the MBR with the old and now invalid information NAV had saved somewhere. Which meant I couldn't boot my machine.

Did I mention I hate computers?

Please realize that I didn't and still don't have a good idea of what is on the master boot record. All I thought it did was wipe the boot loader, so I spent about 4 hours on Saturday trying to reinstall grub.

It wouldn't work. It wouldn't identify the partition but would say it was uknown and of type "0x83". This is strange because 0x83 is the ext2fs partition type identifier. Perhaps it's something to do with the "stage 1.5" loader, so tried figuring that out. Nope. Pulled up the latest CVS to see if that fixed it. Nope.

Started going through the code. Frustrating code. Global variables everywhere makes it hard to follow the thread of meaning. Various #ifdefs for stage 1.5 vs. stage 2 code. Mixed use of "grub_printf" and "printf". Using a statically embedded function as an iterator for a variable in the surrounding scope. Overuse of the for() statement so all of the checks for the end of loop are inside the for() so to have an empty body.

Anyway, I managed to track the problem down to a seven line conditional check for an if statement. Everything was find except for the last part, which was a superblock check.

It failed because the partition entry no longer pointed to an ext2 file system. This is a good thing. However, it didn't tell me why it failed and only implied that something was wrong with the filesystem type identifier.

After I figured out that the partition table was bad, I spent the rest of Saturday getting the machine back into shape. Managed to dig up some tools (like rescuept) which reconstruct the partition table information.

Even getting that going was nasty. Had to figure out how to make a bootable floppy. Used a Red Hat 7 distribution to get into a bare-bones Linux mode then figure out how "mknod" worked so I could talk to the different partitions.

But I don't know anything about partition tables. I managed to get the settings in fdisk to match the output of rescuept. (Used another program to double check, "s" something.)

Amazingly enough, that seemed to work.

EXCEPT!

Under Win98 I could no longer put my laptop into suspend or hibernate mode. No problem under Linux. The only thing that changed was the partition table. I had assigned the FAT partition for my D: drive an identifer of 0xB, but couldn't tell if 0xC was really the right one. (There are suggestions that early FAT32 needed special BIOS support, so I conjectured that perhaps a different identifier was used when that changed.) Changed to 0xC. Still no suspend. Conjectured that there was a setting changed in the registry.

There I was able to pull out my secret weapon, which was that I hadn't made all that many changes to Windows since I copied the files from my old drive to the new one, so I was able to export and diff the two settings. There were a couple of differences, but changing them didn't fix things. Replacing the new registry with the old also didn't. Doing a recursive diff on the two Windows' didn't highlight anything.

Windows running from the old disk can hibernate. So there isn't some PROM setting which needs to be changed. I backed up the /dev/hda1 partition and copied over the old installation. Should be identical code. But still Windows doesn't hibernate from that drive.

A friend of mine works for Microsoft. Called him up hoping he could divine why two almost identical configurations would allow one to standby and the other not to do so (even though it did the week before). His divining agents were no help. And he can't get his laptop to hibernate at all under Windows Me.

Did I mention I don't like computers?

While rereading the Linux man page for "fdisk" I see the comment "you should always use an OS-specific partition table program." So I played around with the Windows fdisk, which is a pale shadow of the Linux one.

Then I noticed a small comment on my worksheet. (Paper doesn't get a corrupted partition table!) It had the statement "in extended partition." Apparently there is a difference between "primary" and "extended" partitions and what I had used as primary partitions 2, 3 and 4 really should be extended partitions 5, 6 and 7. While Linux and Windows understood them just fine as primary partitions, I guessed that perhaps Windows acts differently when there's more than one primary partition.

Rebuilt the partition table to use an extended partition. When I used primary partitions I needed to specify the start and end clusters. When using the extended table I noticed that the start clusters were always correct. Figured this was a good thing.

Somewhere in here my FAT16 and EXT2 partitions became corrupted. Don't know if it was when I created the extended partition or playing around with the Windows fdisk or I forgot to unmount nicely or what it was. But I semi-ruined them. Remember that I said I backed up the FAT16 partition? It was onto the ext2 one, and now that file is in never never land. Also got the only time I've seen where fsck stops and asks for manual intervention.

Computers. Hate. Blech.

Managed to mount and save my home directory. It's about 3GB of which over 1GB are files from various bioinformatics databases. Easy to drop a GB on a 20GB drive. I must admit that nice feature of computers.

So now I'm in the process of reinstalling everything back onto my new hard drive. Didn't loose that much. I was very cautious about my email, so had an extra archive of that. Worst problem will be the final details of my Q4 finances, but even there I still have the paper copies.

Still, I've been working at this for four days, and learned a slew of things I didn't care about and would rather forget. Everything I did needed to be double checked because if I, oh, swapped an if= with an of= I would wipe everything. (I am able to borrow 10GB of space on someone else's machines, so I do have a second backup.)

I hate computers.

How to improve things?

First would be if Norton used the word "Restore" rather than "Repair" in that button I pressed which sent me on this nasty journey. I would really enjoy it if Norton has a "undo last repairs" option since I figured out there would be a problem before I rebooted. I could also have booted into Windows from a grub'ed boot disk to run that command.

Huh. When anything other than Norton touches the MBR, NAV kicks in to say there might be some virus activity. That would have warned me that something possibly back was taking place. I wonder how NAV recognizes self and if an anti-antivirus program could take advantage of that.

Second would be if there was no distinction between "primary" and "extended" partition. I bet it was some sort of hack to get around the 2GB limit in early hardware.

Third would be more verbose reporting information in grub, to say why it couldn't recognize a disk with a correct partition number.

Fourth would be better reporting in Windows to say why things failed - that is, an equivalent to the system log under unix. Hmm, I bet there is, but I just don't know how to find it.

There's probably more, but that's enough for now.

Don Norman is right. Computers are still in their primitive infancy. Will they mature in my lifetime or will there continue to be levels upon levels of needless complexity?

Don't come back telling my why things have to be done this way. Think of it as a challenge. People use software to achieve goals in their domains. How can you reduce (eliminate!) the need for knowledge unrelated to those goals?

Bear in mind too that I've been a programmer since '83 and a professional programmer since '95. If I have this much problem with computers, no wonder I'm not the only one who hates them. But as a programmer, they're the only game in town.

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