I'm messing around with my laptop again. When I purchased this T61 I saved some money by getting a ~ 80 GB 5400 rpm drive. A few months later, I replaced it with a 300 GB 5400 rpm drive and installed Kubuntu. I recently decided to speed it up a little, by installing a 7200 rpm drive, and repartition it again.

I spent quite a bit of time with Gparted trying to stretch the NTFS partition, but without success. It kept complaining that chkdsk needed to be run. I recently bought another license to the latest version of BootIt Next Generation. It was able to stretch the NTFS partition without any problems at all. (Note it can move but not stretch ext2/ext3 partitions, so you still need something like Gparted for full manipulation of ext2/ext3 partitions.) http://www.terabyteu...xt-generation.htm

I decided to finally start backing up my Kubuntu Home directory (even though there's little on it that I couldn't afford to lose) but wanted to do it from Winders. After some false starts, I found that the RW ext2/ext3 IFS works very well and is orders of magnitude faster than a RO driver I had previously tried. So far, it hasn't thrown any errors and has apparently handled linux-only filenames without any action on my part. http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

I've pretty much decided to set up the partitions on this box for XP only. I'll use Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox/... to set up a Kubuntu or similar Linux session and play around with it when necessary. I'm finding that I'm just not using Linux enough to dedicate a partition to it. But I do want to learn more about it and feel more comfortable with it before I have to sink or swim in buying a new OS for a new PC. (I really don't want to have anything to do with Vista...)

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who wonders if he should buy 3 XP licenses before they disappear...)

There seem to be UltraBay adapters for hard drives that would make the swapping even easier, but it's not clear that it's trivial to boot from one.

I'm trying to resist getting a (previous generation) MacBook Pro, though.

Too many toys, not enough time... :-)

Cheers,
Scott.

Kubuntu has been very good to me. All of the recent installs I've done have worked very well with minimal fussing around (sometimes I have to re-get the DHCP address just after rebooting, but that's about it), but I've not yet tried to restore /home or anything else into a fresh install.

The tools for installing new apps have worked very well and I appreciate being able to choose from 25k-some-odd applications with just a click.

But there are some things that I haven't been able to work out in my occasional searching and in the time I've been willing to spend:

1) I did something to Kubuntu on my Fujitsu P7120D such that the VGA bootup screen is now much smaller than it was originally. Probably something to do with trying to enable 1280x800 or whatever "non-standard" full screen the P7120D screen is in X.

2) Sleep/Hibernate/whatever doesn't work out of the box with the P7120D - with the lid closed, the system doesn't go into a sleep mode. It got hot enough once to melt the plastic mouse buttons at one point (it doesn't have a fan).

3) Firefox will regularly close up and die without any explanation when refreshing tabs with the Adobe Flash player (not the latest) enabled on all of my laptops with Kubuntu. I'm sure it's something to do with me because I would think people would be screaming bloody murder if it was common, but it's annoying. Remembering to disable Flash before refreshing all the tabs is annoying.

4) I don't understand enough about the file system permissions, etc., and I have no backup strategy for Linux. It's a learning issue for me obviously, but the benefit for learning that stuff doesn't seem to be worth the investment at this point.

5) I was bitten recently when an important Excel 97 spreadsheet ended up being changed in an obscure way such that it would crash Excel 2007 on Vista. (I eventually narrowed it down to a particular tab, but was unable to find the offending cell/graph/whatever.) This started sometime after I made some changes to it with OpenOffice 2.4. It might have been a coincidence, and the changes were most likely made with OO on Win2k, but it made me nervous. For critical stuff, I need to be able to use Office97 or later (and yes, much of it works on Wine).

At the moment, the benefit in using Linux on my laptops just doesn't seem to be there. I recognize that I need to invest the time for the future (when I eventually get a new machine without XP), but it's not worth it to me at the moment.

Another thing that's bothering me is after lots of fits and starts I managed to get a MythBuntu box working. But when I went back to it a few weeks later to actually see about scheduling some programs to record - you know, to actually start using it - I seemingly ended back where I started. I get a blank screen and the keyboard becomes unresponsive when I tell it I want to "Watch TV". I don't know whether I'm being bitten by the mysterious "2 GB backup of empty libraries" problem I had earlier, or something else. But it's annoying. So, I'm probably going to have to start over with a fresh install of that. :-(

I'm the first to admit that I am flailing around on some of these problems, and a few hours of dedicated searching and reading would probably take care of some/many of them. Trouble is, I've got eleventy-seven irons in the fire and it's difficult to spend the time.

So, dedicated partitions for Linux that get in the way (by reducing available storage for work files, etc.) are going to have to wait for a while.

I hope this explains a little better where I'm coming from. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.

For the past several months, the T61 has been behaving flaky. On booting XP, the hard drive light stays on continuously and things appear to hang, but eventually (like after 10 minutes), it clears up and seems to work reasonably well. I kept Scott's comments about replacing the hard drive in his Mac in the back of my mind, but XP never complained that chkdsk needed to be run, etc., so I wasn't sure that was the problem. There was never any grinding or thunking noise. Memtest86 never found a problem with the RAM. I was beginning to think there was a motherboard problem or something....

As part of my "diagnosis", I disabled a bunch of the Thinkpad utilities since some of the flakiness seemed to start after upgrading those. In the process, I lost automatic wireless connections (had to manually tell the adapter to let Winders run it). :-/ Then, on a lark, I reinstalled them and let the Thinkpad utilities run a diagnostic. What do you know - it says there are bad sectors and it has trouble reading several spots on the disk.... (I see notifications were placed in some of the Winders logs too, buried in the Administrative tools, but I rarely look there.) Linux (on another partition) seemed to run Ok, but I need to be able to run Winders and didn't use it very often.

Bought a 640 GB Samsung SATA to replace the 300 GB Hitachi, along with a Kingwin ATK-25U-S external enclosure. Tried using Clonezilla-SysRescCD to clone the disk, but it complained about errors. I then used ImageforWindows from Terabyte and it completed successfully (but failed on verification, so I disabled that).

I just swapped in the disk, but it wouldn't boot. Hmm. I'm sure Grub experts could solve the problem instantly, but I'm not one of those. Booted a BootItNG Maintenance disk and installed a standard MBR. Rebooted and XP started up. Chkdsk fixed a bunch of things, and here we are.

The plan is to stretch the XP partition, leaving about 50 GB for a fresh install of Ubuntu. Dunno if I'll set up a VM for Ubuntu yet or not...

The Samsung is nearly silent - I haven't run any benchmarks yet.

So far, so good.

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who will try to remember that drives can fail in ways other than catastrophically.)