notes on resuscitating my desktop 06/2008

I have a dual-boot Windows XP/Ubuntu desktop at home. Earlier this week, it started randomly rebooting itself at increasingly shortening intervals. Luckily, my brother was visiting and could try to fix everything. We decided to get a new motherboard, CPU, and memory.

New hardware:

Motherboard: GeForce 7050M-M
CPU: AMD X2 5600+
Memory: A DATA DDR2 800 Dual Kit (4 GB)
TR2-R1 CPU fan

You can replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory, then boot up into Ubuntu, and it should work. It did not work immediately on my Ubuntu installation, as I was still running Feisty and did not have all the drivers necessary for my new motherboard and could not start x. So, we logged in without x (Ctrl+Alt+F4), then upgraded the OS. This required the following commands:

sudo aptitude install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

We did this two times; first upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy, then Gutsy to Hardy. Then, Ubuntu seemed to work.

Next, we tried to repair Windows. We could not boot Windows (it blue screened). Apparently, we should have removed any drivers specific to the old motherboard before replacing it. Of course, we could not boot windows when the original motherboard was going bad, so ... These pages: ars-technica article and ars technica forum give some instructions on how to repair Windows. Supposedly, if we had done things properly, we may have been able to put in the Windows XP disk, hit install, then repair, then let Windows do its magic.

This did not seem to work for us, so we reinstalled Windows, but did not reformat the partition. Thus, we could still see all of our files once installation was complete, but we lost all installed programs. After installing Windows and all the drivers for the new motherboard, Windows seemed to be working okay.

Of course, installing Windows wiped out the Grub menu list, so we could no longer boot into Ubuntu. There were a number of solutions to this problem presented on the Ubuntu forum here, none of which seemed to work. We first tried the Auto Super Grub Disk option. With this, we downloaded an exe which added an extra option to the boot menu, "unetbootin-supergrubdisk". We rebooted, selected this new option, and let it run. It ended up hanging at the
running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 ( hd0)"...
step. We had no idea why. So, we tried many of the other options offered at the Ubuntu forum, with no luck. We burned a Hardy live cd, booted from that, and tried to install grub. After this, we could not even boot Windows.

The first problem seemed to be that in Hardy the hard drive was called sda instead of hda. We got an old Feisty live cd and booted from that. My brother tried many things, but was unable to restore Grub. The final solution seemed to be to set the bootable flag for the Linux partition in the partition table. Previously, only the Windows partition was listed as bootable. The change the bootable flag, my brother used:
fdisk /dev/hd
then followed the menu to change the labels. After this, he rebooted from the Feisty CD, installed Grub again following the first set of instructions under "Quick Start" here. Everything seemed to work!!

To download Windows software from Caltech, I also set up the Caltech VPN, detailed here. So far, programs we have installed are:
Firefox
Flash
Avast
WinSCP
NX Client for Windows
Office 2007
Acrobat

Here are photos of the process:

It is a mess in here. There are computer innards strewn all over the place.

We could not read the blue screen that flashed for a split second when Windows tried to boot, so we took a photo. Turns out, it wasn't saying anything particularly useful.

I did not go crazy during this process.