Posts by kklepper

kklepper · Help & Support (Stable)

I ran into the same problem. Installation according to the seemingly simple Persistent USB install screenshot guide did not work as expected:

It would not install the file system ext4 (or ext3 for that matter, Step 13) on the stick unless I chose as filesystem FAT32, partitioned the stick into a Windows part of 6 GB and a free part of 10 GB, killed the machine by power off, tried again and realized that this partition had worked out fine although the system pretended it wasn't able to. Quite puzzling indeed.

By the way, I'm using a TranscendService stick which might have prevented manipulation on this level of the stick. My Antivir keeps complaining about AutoRun from that stick, although I have deleted this file several times, so some mechanism (from TranscendService ?) must reinstall this file automatically.

Next I was able to use the free partition; almost all of it was allocated as ext4, the rest of less than 700 MB as swap. That was fine with me. Looked encouraging.

The next problem was that the GRUB boot loader could not be installed to the stick. He wanted to install that on my main hard disk, which wasn't my intention. Having no stick installed, the notebook should behave as before, that was my idea. With stick, it should boot automatically from the stick without any choice menu (which it does right now, albeit from RAM, giving the choice of a life system or an install).

Maybe this is not possible. Is it?

NB: On XP, it is fixmbr Remove grub and restore WinXP bootpage, last answer.

When waving the boot loader by power off and restarting from the stick, the system was trapped in an error loop. Obviously the UNetBootin-installation was corrupted.

So I did another round of fresh install on my office machine: Put CrunchBang to the stick with UNetBootin and do all over again. This time, the partitioning was already set. Okay, this was encouraging.

Again, I tried to install GRUB in /dev/sdc5, the free partition on the stick. He couldn't do that, no surprise. So I finally gave in and let him manipulate the master boot record on my hard disk. Next I had to change the bootup sequence back from stick to hard disk In my bios, of course.

Very nice! I get a welcome to GRUB, and that is it. Nothing to choose from, nothing to boot. System is locked. Congratulations!

At least an error message:

no such device: 7f9c0073-ba82-4aeb-9849-9692ed455dc2
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>

Repeating the whole process didn't help; but here comes Google to the rescue:

Grub Rescue: Grub reparieren ganz einfach

Sounds easy, doesn't work: no such partition. What now? After some googling, I decided to restore the bios and reboot from the stick. Doesn't work anymore, GRUB announces: no operation system.

I put the stick back into my office machine, at least Antivir complains about AutoRun, so this hasn't been killed. I moved everything in the root of the stick to subdirectory bak to be sure. The stick now only has 6 GB, so the Linux partition cannot be seen from Windows. Ok.

In order to restore the state of the stick, I used UNetBootin once again. Repeating the whole stuff didn't do anything good. Same thing all over.

Hello Google?

Removing GRUB from windows system after uninstalling Ubuntu from Windows 7

You need Windows 7 installation disk, boot it, choose repair option when you are asked to menu.
It will check automatically for start up problems. Let it check it.
It will not find any problem with start up.
It will allow to choose options. Choose command prompt.
In cmd you have to type just two following commands and grub will be removed.
* bootrec/fixmbr
* bootrec/fixboot
Close cmd and restart your machine.

I'm afraid I will have to do that. Any other advice how I can install #! on my stick?

NB On XP, it is Remove grub and restore WinXP bootpage, last entry.

kklepper · Introductions

@Akareyon:

SPON yes. Put me on a whole new track, finally...

The tutorial is gorgeous, thanks a lot for the hint! What about

Step 14:
A warning will come up telling you you forgot to make a swap partition. Just choose no. A swap partition would only take up valuable space, and compromise the life of your flashdrive.

I have enough room on my stick, haven't I? I understand that a flash drive suffers by the number of read/write operations, but swap is only used if necessary, isn't it, so it might not be used that often, right? Also: obviously the flash drive doesn't need to be partitioned beforehand. And finally: I own this stick for more than a year now and haven't used it since, so it's time to make some use of it before it is totally obsolete.

As to your story -- very interesting and a nice read indeed! All the best to you!

@xero

I didn't know about these JavaScript solutions; also, this doesn't sound like you could concentrate on your message. Presenting your ideas is something different from programming -- I know what I'm talking about.

@brontosaurusrex

Well, you didn't see any of my presentations yet, I bet. As said, PowerPoint is a tool, and what I have seen as presentations, especially from programmers, but not restricted to them, is really extremely primitive.

OpenOffice no doubt can do that job just as well, so in case I begin another one from scratch, I will certainly give it a shot. But reworking a full-fledged show just for complying to a principle doesn't yield any satisfaction (at least not to me).

To give you an idea about the work behind that show: it actually is a work in progress, I didn't count the stages of development, but I guess there must be 50 different versions developed over 2 years with respect to different audiences, reworked after each assignment to incorporate the lessons learned.

Considering the amount of work invested in that show, the transition to OpenOffice wouldn't be that much, a couple of days may be, but who would want me to waste my lifetime on that totally uninteresting task?

kklepper · Introductions

Well, you know, it is not a question of the tool you're working with but the amount of work you have put into the result. Any tool is perfect in the hands of the master and useless in the hands of the fool -- that's what a tool is.

With respect to a PowerPoint show, it is the impression the audience gets, not the actual code or effects or graphics or wording or whatever. Something in my head should be transferred as good as possible to the heads of the audience, so that they can understand and realize what I mean, and the show is just a means to this end.

Hence it doesn't make sense to put a lot of work into rewriting something good into something which can't be better, just to please the operating system, does it?

kklepper · Introductions

To both of you: thanks a lot! My hard disk has 2 partitions already, XP is sitting on one of them, so I understand that #! could be installed on the 2nd.

kklepper · Introductions

Hello everybody, I am based in a little town in OWL which is the northeast part of NRW in Germany, bordering the south of Lower Saxony.

I have quite some experience with running my own Web server, managed by the hosting company, using SuSE. In my office, I use XP to develop web applications on a LAMP stack.

Recently, I discovered Vagrant and Virtualbox and docker, so I gained a lot of experience with Ubuntu these days, albeit from a terminal perspective only.

Reading about Mint in an online magazine, I got curious. I didn't know anything about all the different Linux distributions I heard about in my life, maybe a dozen of them, but now I know that there are virtually hundreds.

I have an old ThinkPad T42 with XP also and tried to run several distributions using UNetBootin and my 16 GB-USB-stick, only to realize that most of them, including Mint, will not run as this machine doesn't support pae.

Xubuntu was fine, however, and CrunchBang looks very promising, so after having found hints to overcome the "Super"-key-problem in this forum, having no Windows key on T42, I decided to step into deeper water and install #!.

Well, half way I lost my gumption. I didn't know how to interpret the options for the hard disk.

I want to leave everything as it is, so far, in particular because I need this machine for a PowerPoint presentation which did not look fine in Xubuntu. This experience wasn't very surprising, as I had tried to manipulate that presentation with Open Office on XP and switched back to PowerPoint, because even under XP many details had to be fine-tuned again which didn't make sense.

In case I could run PowerPoint within CrunchBang using wine or something else without problems, I could even forget about XP on this machine, but right now this is no option.

My idea was that 7 GB free space on my main partition should be enough for CrunchBang , and I expected to be asked for this option: to use the free space for Linux. Instead, I was afraid that every option would kill my XP data no matter what.

Is that true? And if so, how could I install CrunchBang alongside XP? Most everybody does this, right? Shouldn't be a problem at all. I probably misunderstand something.

Another idea was to run CrunchBang from the stick; the stick appears as separate volume in the options dialog, so this might be an easy solution. That way I would not have to touch the hard disk of the notebook and could decide to run Linux just by putting the stick into the slot.

Would that be a good idea? As far as I can understand the life scenario, about 700 MB on the stick are reserved for the live system anyway. Once installed properly, I could get rid of the live system, right? Or use it for another system.

The live system itself isn't really an option to work with as it forgets about the WLAN connection details, so I have to deliver that data every time I log into the system.

Any ideas?

CrunchBang Linux

SEARCH

#1 Re: Help & Support (Stable) » [Solved] Win7/#! Dual-Boot snafu - the saga concluded. » 2014-02-05 15:57:55

#2 Re: Introductions » Newbie needs support » 2014-02-04 15:34:03

#3 Re: Introductions » Newbie needs support » 2014-02-04 12:31:08

#4 Re: Introductions » Newbie needs support » 2014-02-03 19:57:18

#5 Introductions » Newbie needs support » 2014-02-03 15:44:40

Board footer