Since I’m all by myself for the next few weeks with the wife and the girls in Japan, I’ve been finding projects and such to do that I normally never find the time to get around to.<\/p>\n
Today I tackled the task of trying to retrieve data from my old old laptop computer, an Acer Travelmate 512T. Given as a gift to me by my parents when I returned from my LDS mission in 1999, it has some impressive specs: 400×800 12.1″ LCD monitor, blazing speed of 366 MHz with an awesome 32MB of RAM and a 4Gb HD. Truly an impressive machine. I used it daily from 1999-2004 or so, about the time I graduated with my BS. Since I came to Austin we had a better home computer for the family and I used it progressively less and less. The last time I remembered using it was the summer and fall of 2007, when my wife and the girls were in Japan for an especially long summer. That summer I used it primarily to dink around with some linux distributions, and to write some journal entries. It was those journal entries I was interested in retrieving, since that was during the time when my wife’s mother suddenly passed away, and so I had a lot to think and write about as I dealt with the emotional difficulties of that time.<\/p>\n
So I dug out the laptop from the back of the closet upstairs. Battery was shot, but I still had the AC adapter. That was OK. The hinge in the screen\/lid is broken, but the display still works and I’m able to get it open. I turn it on – and it gives me a BIOS error. The BIOS battery is dead! Fortunately though, it gives me the option to continue with the boot defaults. So I boot it with the default BIOS, and it takes me to a GRUB screen for an Ubuntu installation – that must have been the last linux distro that I installed on it. However, at the GRUB screen it locks up. It doesn’t recognize any keyboard input for some reason, and after a few taps it starts beeping: the familiar sound of when the keyboard buffer is full. I wait a few minutes, but nothing changes. It looks like perhaps GRUB or the boot sector is corrupted.<\/p>\n
Trying to fix this is beyond my expertise, so I decide try a different approach: a live CD. I have a bunch of old Ubuntu, Knoppix, and other linux live CDs that I can try. Since it was an Ubuntu installation, I try one of my old Ubuntu CDs. I didn’t want to try a newer one, because with a whopping 366 MHz of CPU speed and 32 Mb of RAM, there’s no way it could handle the more recent versions of Ubuntu. I had an Ubuntu v3 CD so I tried that. Well, it worked – sort of – but it literally took 30 minutes for it to boot up. When it finally<\/em> finished, I went to the file browser to see what was there. It had 3 hda’s: hda1 is generated by the Ubuntu live CD to house the OS files and actually resides in memory. hda2 was a few hundred megabytes, and hda3 was the rest of the hard drive. Maybe hda2 housed the critical OS files, or maybe it was originally a swap drive, but it didn’t recognize it as such. However, Ubuntu was unable to mount either of them: it recognized they were there, but couldn’t recognize any kind of file system.<\/p>\n It didn’t look good, perhaps the entire file system or disk was corrupt. Well, Ubuntu was no good, so I decided to try one of my other distributions: Knoppix, Minty, Puppy, Mandriva, an old Mandrake (before it became Mandriva), Red Hat, and DSL<\/a>. Mandriva, Mandrake, and Red Hat were not live CDs. Of these, I figured DSL was the best choice for an old small machine.<\/p>\n So DSL only took about 5 minutes to boot up (a significant improvement!), and though it is a very<\/em> simplified GUI, it seemed to work flawlessly. So the real question was: would it mount the drive? It was unable to mount hda2, but hda3 successfully mounted! So what was on it? I couldn’t find a graphical file browser, so I had to go to the good ol’ command line. I had trouble remembering the linux filesystem structure, but after a few minutes of scratching my head I remembered that the various mounted volumes are in \/mnt\/, so \/mnt\/hda3\/ took me to the drive in question. Inside that there was a \/home\/derek\/journal\/. Jackpot! I went there and cat<\/em>ed a few of the files there, I had written them in plain text so they were easily readable: except where I had used Japanese characters. DSL didn’t seem to be able to do unicode, but as long as I could copy the files as-is I figured there wouldn’t be a problem.<\/p>\n So the next question was: how to copy them? This laptop had a PCMCIA ethernet card, a 3.5″ floppy drive, and one single USB port. I didn’t want to mess with trying to get the ethernet working and configured, not to mention even if I did, how would I copy it to my main computer? SAMBA or something? I didn’t have the slightest clue of how to do that. I figured the USB port was the easiest. I plugged in a thumb drive, mounted it without a problem, and copied the whole directory over. I also did a quick look at what else was there. The most interesting was a bunch of configuration files for DOSBox<\/a>, and a file called ‘BattleTech – The Crescent Hawks Revenge.zip’. I copied it over for good measure. That game<\/a> was way fun, though fiendishly hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since I’m all by myself for the next few weeks with the wife and the girls in Japan, I’ve been finding projects and such to do that I normally never find the time to get around to. Today I tackled … Continue reading