laptop crashed after what i think was an update from microsoft that went wrong.. one of the upgrades to windows 10, or subsequent updates..
in any case, my HP envy would not boot up anymore. Wouldn’t restore.. I even took the drive out, ran chkdisk on it, fixed a whole lot of issues.. but no go.
so.. I took the files i needed off of it.. and decided to start fresh with linux Mint.
– for some of the things above, i had to order a nifty gadget that allowed me to hook up a drive to my other computer just as if it was an external drive.
– i also needed a SD card that could hold at least 1.8 GB to hold the ‘live boot’ for mint.
– i used my other computer to boot up on that sd card, and have it install onto the ‘external hard drive’.
– i then put the drive back into the Envy.. tweaked the BIOS to allow for ‘legacy support’ for boot up.. and voila, i’m now running Mint on it
One of my first few learnings (or refreshers really, as i did use unix a long time ago).. was figuring out some installs and little details…getting my printer to work, as well as it’s scanning function.
Then i also wanted to create an image of an SD car i had, to burn onto another sd card.
after a couple failed attempts with gDiskDump, i decided to just learn the underlying linux commands..using “dd”
(the attempts did get me to learn some install commands.. ie.
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools (installed it great, but turned out it no longer had the easy install i was looking for to get a program that seemed to be stopping gdiskdump from working..)
sudo apt install python-pip (not sure if it was already there, but installed pip)
pip install pynotify (installed the missing item.. so gdiskdump would work.. though still got errors when it tried to create the images).
This site helped me: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-dd-create-make-disk-image-commands/
with the added trick of unmounting the sd card partitions so that i could copy the entire device rather than a partition. (maybe i should have tried gDiskdump after the unmount come to think of it)
– figured out the device name using df (or hovering over the item in the file explorer)
sudo umount /dev/mmcblk0p2
sudo umount /dev/mmcblk0p1
-next step took about 5 minutes to create the ~8GB image (zipped to about 3.5)
sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 | gzip -c > ./pifull.img.gz
–next step took about 20 minutes to write the image
sudo gunzip -c ./pifull.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0
I’m sure i’ll be placing lots of things here for my notes..
Networking…
I wanted to transfer files from my other (Windows 7) laptop to this Mint one..
I found a great site to help with getting the Mint one visible on the windows one.. Still haven’t gotten the reverse to work.
http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/how-to-configure-samba-server-and-transfer-files-between-linux-windows
sudo apt install samba
sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf [backup name]
sudo vi smb.conf to edit the file and add this at the end:
[share]
comment = Ubuntu File Server Share
path = /srv/samba/share
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no
create mask = 0755
sudo mkdir -p /srv/samba/share
sudo chown nobody:nogroup /srv/samba/share/
sudo systemctl restart smbd.service nmbd.service
Voila, the share was visible to windows.. just had to login when clicking on it.
Went back to reinstall..
Used win32 formatter app to image an sd card to back it up.. and then write the mint boot iso to it using same program
That program needed a reboot to work btw.
Taking Ages to get between the partition selection and waiting for the time zone selection…
Or is it stuck…
Oh btw, I have to use the gadget because this laptop has no bios option to boot from Sd card.. but the other laptop does..
So not sure if things weren’t working or just really slow.. gave up on the sd card. Grabbed a larger USB stick, and put the iso on there. Then I could boot from is right on the issue laptop
Install went quicker and made more sense on the feedback for my selections..
Also the version being installed over top of the past version seems newer.. so it did warn me of some things
Crossing fingers this gets it all working again.
Btw.. this all started because of a chmod-R at the root messing up system files
So I’m hoping they all get fixed
I couldn’t get wifi working and I even had to manual fix a couple things to get sudo and su working
Install is still progressing…..
Installation crashed near the end due to a failure to write the efi boot file.. said the system wouldn’t be able to boot
But I was hopeful this could be ignored since I was just replacing and existing install
It was hung, so hit power down
Pulled out the USB stick
It gave me a ubuntu Boot up list
It booted up fiNe
Actually gave me the same desktop as before
Gave me some system detected errors..
I was able to connect to wifi fine
System fixes were failing in some places due to the missing grub boot up
…
so something was a little fishie with the ‘grub’ boot up stuff.
i ran these:
# sudo apt-get purge grub\*
# sudo apt-get install grub-efi
# sudo apt-get autoremove
# sudo update-grub
I rebooted..
tried a couple waiting updates.. and they installed fine.
so installed all the updates..
no more errors.
setting up a ‘Timeshift’ system snapshot.
restored a couple apps that i backed up using the backup tool before i tried the OS update. That may have worked on a couple things.
I reran google chrome’s install and that started working again – everything as if it was never gone.. even the girl’s bookmarks and such.
Now i’m setting the printer back up as that didn’t survive.. likely easier ways.. but couldn’t get the printer’s ip address.. so looked at the router’s list of connected MAC addresses.. turned it off and compared which one was gone. then used arp-a to see the list of mac-ip address.. bingo. added that ip to the printer ip prompt in mint.