Huge disappointment, folks! I took the suggestion of some people on RFD’s forums and let the install process run on for the entire day in case the system was taking a long time to copy files over. Ok…over 8 hours later when I came back home it was still stuck at 24%.

Grrrrr…I swapped out the 40-gig HD because someone else suggested that that might be at fault. I popped in the old 2-gig HD that the T20 first came with and started the install again. A couple of hours later this was also stuck at 24%. My friend, MW, called and we got to thinking that it may now be something wrong with the installer or there may be something going on with the DVD drive itself. I’m strongly leaning to something mucked up with the installer software.

I’ve decided to shelve this for now (literally, since I just put the T20 on a shelf) and ordered 6.06 from Ubuntu. I may go onto Ubuntu’s forums and update the folks there. Personally, I think that the RFD guys were a lot more help.

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A couple of days ago, I mentioned looking at the site stats and the hosting provider finally updated those. I was very surprised to see that in less than a week this site had 75 visitors. I know that the vast majority were simply spiders and bots but there were at least a dozen or so visitors with a couple coming from my old address.

Thanks!

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Ok, MW suggested that I run a memory test on the machine since it seems as if it might be a hardware problem. We suspected that it might be the DVD ISO image at first because when I ran the “Check CD for Defects” test earlier yesterday morning it had dumped me to the LiveDVD desktop. I then pointed out that that may not indicated a defect but rather that the DVD may have passed the test if it was designed for CDs only. Meaning, that the defective CD test may have been programmed only with CDs in mind.

MW thinks that if the machine hangs at the copying files part of the installation process then it might be due to a memory error. Possible but not sure so that’s why we’re conducting the test. It’s been over nine hours now and no hint of a problem so far. I’m going to have to look up how long this test is supposed to take.

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Very frustrating few hours. Downloaded a new DVD ISO image and checked the MD5 hash-whatever on that so it’s fine. Been trying to install Ubuntu any number of ways including regular install, install in safe graphics mode, install in text mode, etc. The furthest I’ve gotten so far is 34% in copying files over during the install process.

I’ve been on the Ubuntu forums and the replies are pretty quick if not exactly very helpful just yet. Just very frustrating so far. Now, I know why Linux hasn’t really stormed the personal desktop market.

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Yep, $16.53 (or thereabouts) is the amount of money collected over the past year on the streets as I rode along. The most common denomination, of course, was the penny but I was also surprised at picking up loonies and toonies. You’d think people would be a lot more concerned about losing a toonie and would be on the lookout for those. One toonie was actually found on a street teeming with the less fortunate of Canadian society.

Ahhh well, this pocketful of change should go towards easing the cost of the new saddle when it finally arrives.

In retrospect, I wonder how much effect this picking up of loose change had on my overall average speed? hrmm…

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After waking up poor MW, it turns out that my mistake was not checking the MD5 hash on the download. The number did not correspond to what I was supposed to have. Back to downloading and using Bittorrent this time around. It’s faster than last night’s download but will still take around six hours. Laterz.

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Ok, it took about 9 hours but downloaded the DVD ISO of Ubuntu Linux. I am now burning it to DVD courtesy of the instructions on the Ubuntu website. It looks like it’s going to take a while since it seems I am burning at 1x.

Oh well, go on to do other things in the meantime.

Ok, over an hour later…popped the Ubuntu DVD ISO into the T20’s drive and let’s see what happens. Ok, a bit of a hiccup with that Windows’s error:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

But, I am now in the Ubuntu install screen. Did a quick Google search on “ubuntu Thinkpad T20″ and one link that comes up is Thinkwiki on installing Ubuntu on a T20 but, really, these sort of guides are not meant for newbies like me. Like, what does the following mean?

Assuming you actually have Ubuntu installed (i.e., not running from Live CD) To add this boot option, open /boot/grub/menu.lst and look for the line(s) (there will be one for each boot menu choice) similar to:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-386 root=UUID=1a2b3c4d-5e6f-1234-7a8b-1a2b3c4d5e6f ro

(n.b., I’ve obscured the UUID hex string above).

and add acpi=force to the lines you wish to change (i.e., the choices you want ACPI enabled for, though you probably only want to add to the line corresponding to the option for normal boot, not the recovery boot options).

N.B. *** READ THIS ***. Before running the grub-install line *at your own risk* below, make sure you know what you’re doing (i.e., have read the grub documentation) and that /dev/hda *is* your boot drive otherwise you may render your system unbootable. Obviously if you’re not using grub then this won’t work.

Now run: grub-install /dev/hda

With this enabled suspend and resume works OK with the following caveats:

1. Weird errors seem to get output on resume. 2. Sometimes the machine will randomly enter suspend mode. This may be a setting in power manager that I’ve got set wrong or due to LCD screen wobble (suspend activates on lid close, resumes on lid open). The power manager help indicates how to set advanced gconf settings. There are also files in /etc/modprobe.d and /etc/acpi for further machine-specific configuration (TODO: investigate and post results here).

My eyes! My eyes!!!
Uh oh…getting a load of errors on the T20’s screen. An example is:

[309.214736] Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 1149247

I’m beginning to suspect HD failure again but I will let it run for a few more minutes. An alternative might be to re-install that old 2-gig HD and see if I can load Ubuntu onto that.

Ok, system seems to have stopped doing anything or else it’s unable to “free free buffer”. I’ll re-boot and try again.

Ok, same problem with a frightening number of I/O errors. Once this is over, I am going to try the old HD.

Ok, old HD installed and we’re back with the Ubuntu install screen.?? Hrmmm…same errors. Great…now, I’m wondering if the whole system is toast?

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After a marathon talk-to with my good friend, MW, it’s been determined that the HD may not be toast. Plan was to leave off the machine for the night and continue this morning with seeing whether or not I could use MS’ suggestions in response to the error message.

Sounds good right? Well, the machine is not cooperating, I’m getting to the BIOS startup page and choosing the ATAPI device but not going much further beyond that. Hrmm..maybe I should pay more attention to the T20 than here. It’s now entering Windows Setup and now I am in the Recovery Console.

Running chkdsk /r gives me a “The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.” message. Oh joy.

Tried to run bootcfg /rebuild and it gives me another error. Looks like a corrupt file system. Ok, I am very much at the point where I don’t think that running any of these commands is going to help.

I’m going to see whether or not I can load WinXP back onto the system. In retrospect, I’m not sure that that’s a good idea since I really don’t have an official CD. My earlier installation was through the courtesy of an ex-housemate and I don’t think it’s right to use my sister’s WinXP CD. I was considering Linux and I have devoted my system to downloading Ubuntu’s DVD ISO for all of last night (3.5 Gigs!). Bet you didn’t think that there was a DVD ISO did you? hehehe

Well Windows setup says that it cannot find a previous version of Windows on the T20. That file directory system must be really messed up. Oops! My sister’s XP CD is an upgrade version. Ok, that tears it, I am going to have load Linux onto the T20. The download only needs a couple of more minutes and then I will burn it onto a DVD and we will go on from there. Linux here we come!

Big thanks to my friend, MW who has insisted all along that the HD is not dead.

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As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, my T20 died on me while in Montreal. Yesterday, I decided to take a serious look at what was going on and looked up the error message along with posting it on RFD’s forums. I did what Microsoft suggested in response to the particular error message but nothing was taking. I then followed a suggestion offered by someone that I should use something called “Ultimate Boot CD” which is a collection of disk utilities and diagnostic programs.

I downloaded and burned the collection on to a CD and popped it into the T20. Running SeaTools, it turned out that my HD is kaput and it’s out of warranty. *sigh*

I’m tempted to pop in the old 2 gig HD and use that with Ubuntu Linux like my good friend, MW, has been suggesting all along. Will I be stepping forth into LAMP? Stay tuned folks!

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It’s a bit odd but I’ve actually been looking more at my site stats than I have been in posting here. Sorry! Don’t know why..guess it’s just the capability where I can see how many people have accessed this website whereas before I couldn’t do that. It has never bothered me before and I will try to not let it bother me again.

Ok, nothing much happening at the moment. Toronto’s in a bit of a deep freeze and no riding possible. Well, I could but I don’t want to ruin my bike so I am staying in for a bit. I am a bit disappointed that CycleTherapy hasn’t called me back yet for the new Brooks B17 saddle that I ordered almost two weeks ago. Maybe I’ll just have to give them a call and see what’s up?

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