Linux Does What Its Told


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I did something stupid today. As stated in a previous post, I just set up my laptop with a triple boot system: Vista, XP, and Ubuntu. I had to zero(erase) out a hard drive for a client. Since I had my new Ubuntu laptop at work, I decided to use it. I plugged my drive I needed to erase into the usb port using an ide-to-usb adapter. I then opened up the terminal and entered the command.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

While the drive is being erased, I kept using my system. I noticed Firefox took a long time to open, this kind of annoyed me. Why was my new Ubuntu system running so slow? I figured it out. This was because dd was running(erasing) on my main laptop drive. I am assuming Ubuntu was still running since it was installed on the end of the drive and dd had not yet gotten to it(since it was mounted, maybe dd would have stopped before it got to its / partition). Now my laptop is temporarily a brick. No big deal, I had no important data on it.

The strange thing is my laptop must run in ide not sata mode. I say this because I did not have to load sata drivers to install XP. I Unconsciously most have assumed that my internal drive was /dev/hda. When I plugged in the usb device, I assumed that it was the first sata device, /dev/sda, but it was really /dev/sdb.

At least I did this to my system and not a client's system with important data. I am pretty certain I would have been more careful if I knew client data could be erased with a simple mistake.

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I did something stupid today.

Join the club. :D

I've been frustrated with trying to get linux-flash installed on FreeBSD, I had lots of errors. So I blew out my FreeBSD partition with fdisk and did a clean install of FreeBSD, this time I only did a base install. I'm using pkg_add to install xorg and kde. I decided against compiling as it takes forever. After this I'm going to boot into Slackware for the next little while, LOL.

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Until a couple of days ago, I did not realize their is not a BSD port of "Adobe Flash". I could not imagine running an OS without being able to view flash media. I am sure you guys saw that Slashdot article about flash being broken with linux. You think Adobe with its deep pockets could fix this.

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Until a couple of days ago, I did not realize their is not a BSD port of "Adobe Flash". I could not imagine running an OS without being able to view flash media. I am sure you guys saw that Slashdot article about flash being broken with linux. You think Adobe with its deep pockets could fix this.

There is a freebsd port for linux-flash called linux-flashplugin7. Strangely enough my re-install worked. I did have some corrupted libraries.

New install of FreeBSD 7.0. Linux flash7 working:-)

Edit// added later: Yeah, I also find it odd that there isn't a BSD version of flash, I need to run flash in linux emulation mode. I hope at some point I'll be able to run flash natively.

post-92-1219106228_thumb.jpg

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Until a couple of days ago, I did not realize their is not a BSD port of "Adobe Flash". I could not imagine running an OS without being able to view flash media. I am sure you guys saw that Slashdot article about flash being broken with linux. You think Adobe with its deep pockets could fix this.

Heh, try setting up flash to run on an 64-bit version of Linux. Not only does flash support suck for linux, but Adobe doesn't even have a plugin compatible with 64-bit firefox. My choices were to run 32-bit firefox or emulate the plugin from 32-bit (I chose the latter).

I did something stupid today.
Isn't that why you got into Linux? To break things and then fix 'em :P
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The strange thing is my laptop must run in ide not sata mode. I say this because I did not have to load sata drivers to install XP. I Unconsciously most have assumed that my internal drive was /dev/hda. When I plugged in the usb device, I assumed that it was the first sata device, /dev/sda, but it was really /dev/sdb.

IINM all ATA HDDs, parallel or serial, that are supported by libata (the newish unified ATA driver) are mapped as /dev/sd?.

Edit: Yeah, I rolled a kernel with IDE disabled and libata enabled and everything moved over to sd?. I think. It was hard to tell with everything broken.

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Isn't that why you got into Linux? To break things and then fix 'em :P

I smiled and chuckled when it happened :-)

Heh-heh, you would chuckle. :) Anyone like you who can hack Gentoo or LFS has my greatest respect.

Did you recover your laptop yet, shanenin? Re-install?

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The easiest way to setup a triple boot is to install in the following order: oldest to newest version of Windows, then Linux last. I installed XP last evening, tonight, I will install Vista, tomorrow, I will install Ubuntu.

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Yeah, I rolled a kernel with IDE disabled and libata enabled and everything moved over to sd?. I think. It was hard to tell with everything broken.

My first(and only) thought is your fstab would be messed up.

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My first(and only) thought is your fstab would be messed up.

Indeed. The breakage was expected, the exact form it took wasn't. I was a bit surprised when mount told me that I had hda3 mounted as / when hda3 didn't exist ;)

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