Ubuntu :: System Upgrade Woes - Wipe Drive?
Apr 29, 2011
I have a real love/hate relationship with Ubuntu. A few weeks back my Windows XP crashed and I had to take it to a tech to have my drive wiped and the operating system reinstalled. Just when I got XP back up and working perfectly someone told me to try Ubuntu. I made the Ubuntu 10.10 boot installation disc and installed it. Although I partitioned the drive during the install I was never able to reboot to Windows and thus lost all the files and programs I had just finished installing.
Okay. long story short: I got used to running Ubuntu and started to like it. Then this morning I was prompted to upgrade to Natty 11.04. After the install I got a message about being low on utilities and to boot in the Ubuntu Classic mode, which I was not able to do.
So now my machine is virtually non-functional. It won't run any programs but sometimes if I'm lucky I can get the computer to shut off without pulling the plug from the wall. I think I just need to wipe the drive and start over. Can someone tell me how to do this using DOS without having to make another long trip to my tech? Luckily I have a Windows XP laptop to use to access this forum.
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Sep 24, 2010
I decided to go ahead and upgrade my 9.10 amd64 to 10.04 ( a little late in the game I know, but I liked Karmic) Well I goofed when prompted to upgrade grub. After reading some other posts about various grub issues, I did the Boot Info Script (results posted below).
Code:
Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010
============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================
=> Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive in
[code].....
I have a external usb with a Ubuntu OS on it that I was able to boot into and do some digging. When I upgraded I selected the NTFS partition instead of the actual /boot partition and jacked it all up. Im currently downloading the 10.04 liveCD to repair the grub on the /boot after I repair the MBR on the NTFS partition. Hopefully I can attempt to repair my Linux partitions by reinstalling the Grub that is on the 10.04 liveCD WITHOUT formatting my current partitions and still be able to keep all my current configurations.
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Feb 3, 2011
I just upgraded from lucid to 10.10. After the reboot, I can only see recovery mode entries in grub.I tried
Code:
update-grub and update-burg
( i think i had burg installed) both to no avail. I also tried re-installing grub onto my main ssd hd, with the command
Code:
grub-install /dev/sda
nothing there either.
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Nov 28, 2009
I decided to upgrade finally. It didn't go smoothly and right now I'm not really sure what is going on. During the install when it was scanning my disks it threw a timeout error but continued anyway. I completed the install but one thing that seemed odd to me is that I wasn't asked about packages or anything and it never prompted me for any other CDs. I wasn't sure what was going on. I did a re-install but same results.
So I figured fine I'll just configure things myself. I went to mount my other partitions and was unable to. I'm not sure what was done but I've not been able to get to my old data. I'm not even sure where to start because things are so different. I ran fdisk -l and I see these devices:
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
/dev/dm-0
/dev/dm-1
Under /dev/sda It shows /dev/sda1 but tells me that partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary it then shows /dev/sda2. This has a System of Linux LVM. Same with my /dev/sdb1. I am guessing this is where my 2 old partitions went. I looked up LVM which I didn't know anything about before. Previously I was about to mount my partitions directly so I'm pretty sure they were not LVM. So somehow these got converted?
I don't know what /dev/dm-0 and /dev/dm-1 are but I do get errors on them:
Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Right now I'm trying to simply get to my data once again or determine if it's unrecoverable. At this point I'm at a loss as to how to proceed. I know I didn't tell the install to format anything other than the first partition. Oh and after the two Fedora installs I did take a peek at Unbuntu. I started that install and it told me that the partition I was installing on was too small. So I canceled it. It showed the other partitions but I could see no way to read them.
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May 26, 2010
Took an FC12 system to FC13 via 'preupgrade'There was a REALLY old version of gimp-print-cups in RPM, and the installer announced "a fatal error occurred". However, everything else seemed to download properly and I allowed the upgrader to reboot the system.
a) grub boots the kernel, then the kernel can't find root and panics. It does this because it can't root file system with root=UUID= kernel option. If I manually tweek the grub line to use root=/dev/sdx, kernel finds its root and boots up to the next problem.
b) GUI environment not launched. Init scripts die on "error loading modules.dep". Sure enough - one is not there. Ran "depmod" to generate it ,and rebooted. System reboots into GUI, where I login to find the next problem.
c) Evolution won't start. Reason turns out the evolution-data-server from FC12 is still present. Did a check on just how many other FC12 RPM's are present: 1100. Yeah - over 1000. About 850 of the FC12 RPM's also had FC13 replacements installed. Did an "rpm -e" on these. Also had to do some remove action on mkinitrd, nash, plymouth-scripts-0.8.0, and parted-1.9.0 as there are replacements for these utilities under different package names. That cleaned up the system some, to present me with the next problem.
d) yum package repository still linked into FC12. Removed fedora-release-12-2.noarch and then I could "yum install" evolution and a few other packages properly.
I've done one other FC12->FC13 upgrade today, and that went flawlessly. So, I think in general the upgrade works fine. It just looks like if preupgrade finds anything amiss, it doesn't take care of a lot of things and generally leaves you with an unbootable mess to clean up.
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Jul 24, 2010
I recently used a flash drive to try MeeGo on my netbook. Unfortunately, the application I used to write MeeGo to the flash drive created a new partition in a rather unusual format. The Ubuntu disk utility can't delete the partition, and GParted can't even see it. How can I completely wipe the flash drive from Ubuntu? I'd prefer not to install any additional software.
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Jun 1, 2010
I want to wipe the drive to the bios before shipment back to factory. I tried Daricks nuke but it wouldnt burn to usb with the usual programs. What program will TOTALLY nuke my hard drive and work with netbootin or other UBU program..?
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Aug 15, 2010
So in essence, my drive has become a cluster of random partitions, multiple Ubuntu installs, and random windows systems. It's gotten so bad that on my entire 250gb system my main Ubuntu install only gets 40gb of memory. Could anybody give me a step by step guide to do the following:
1. Completely wipe and departition my disc.
2. Install Ubuntu from a backup .tar file
3. Install a 40gb windows 7 partition
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Apr 16, 2011
how do i wipe the system runing ubuntu 10.04? can i use sudo fdisk tryed many times but cant find the right command .
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Mar 8, 2011
I'm returning a failing [under warrantee] WD hard drive--first time I've ever RMAd a hard drive. Drive has Mint+Ubuntu installed.
I've backed up my data and am wondering:
What's the best way to wipe the data before I return drive? I want to do this right because I don't want any hassles with WD about this.
Should I use my Mint or Ubuntu LiveCD to reformat it? Or is it better to use a Linux pgm to write zeros?
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May 14, 2011
What should be done to completely wipe clean a solid state drive (before selling a computer)? What should be done for a regular drive, and what considerations apply to a SSD?
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Aug 8, 2011
I had Ubuntu on my hard drive and tried to install Arch Linux. Things got messy and I now have an unstable, unbootable machine. I feel the installation failed because there were remains of Ubuntu. I'd like to wipe the hard drive and start over from scratch; without anything on there. How do I do this? I have several partitions made in a desperate attempt to make it all work. So I'd like to remove all partitions and any other information that's on the drive. I can not start any OS, but I can boot with the Live USB of Arch Linux...
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Nov 28, 2010
I am trying to wipe the hard drive on an ancient laptop. The current plan is to find a live distro that can run shred or equivalent program. The problem is that most ultralight linux's don't seem to work with the RAM restrictions (Optimistically 80 MB, Worst Case 16 or less). I will likely have to just bust open the case and physically mutilate the Drive I would prefer a more 'civilized' approach (defined as one which keeps the machine in one functioning piece).
Model: Dell Latitude XPi CD
Processor: Intel (Inside) Pentium (one?) MMX
Available Media: CD, Possibly Floppy (I have access to only one other machine with a drive)
OS: Windows 95
I am having a hard time getting any farther specs. If anyone knows of a distro that has a prayer of running in these conditions I would love to know.
Current candidates:
Puppy Linux < 1.0.2
DSL (Unsure of architecture compatibility)
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Feb 17, 2010
I was reading a website about securely wiping data from your hard drive with wipe on the right click menu, when I stumbled across part of the article where it talked about journaling filesystems.Article
Quote:
There are three types of journaling: journal, ordered and writeback. Using shred, with an ext3 file system presents the user with the problem of secure deletion because it can only really be effectively used with ordered and writeback journals. It also lists ext4 as a journaling file system in the article, so I looked up the wikipedia page on it and I also found this:
Delayed allocationExt4 uses a filesystem performance technique called allocate-on-flush, also known as delayed allocation. It consists of delaying block allocation until the data is going to be written to the disk, unlike some other file systems, which may allocate the necessary blocks before that step. This improves performance and reduces fragmentation by improving block allocation decisions based on the actual file size. So I am confused about this delayed allocation thing. My thoughts are that ext3 and other journaling filesystems are bad to use with secure wipe when they are set on journal mode because that writes the file to the journaling sector as well as to the hard drive. Apparently, in ext3, the default was ordered mode. I would like to know if anyone has any idea if the ext4 file system on karmic 64bit is hazardous to the security of using the wipe command.
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Aug 15, 2011
I'm trying to do a simple install. Wipe out existing system and replace with 11.04 but I can't get past initial screen. Is there a different CD version I need to use? Last year I used 10.04 LTS and it worked fine, this year I wanted to start with the newest and go from there. I use Remastersys to make my own install version for 600+ laptops and I need to be able to wipe out the existing systems without effort.
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Jan 23, 2010
My home server runs Debian Lenny, and I'm about to upgrade the system drive to a larger drive.In the process, I want to take the opportunity to reorganize the partitions and resize them. For learning purposes, I'm planning to migrate from an MBR partition table to GPT.Because of those two changes, I can't just run "dd if=/old/drive of=/new/drive" (well, not without lots more work afterwards). I could use the debootstrap process to get a fresh installation on the new system drive, but I used that technique during the last system upgrade and it's probably overkill for this.Can I just copy the partitions from the old drive to the new?Will "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb2" work, assuming /dev/hdb2 is larger than /dev/hda1? (If so, the filesystem can be resized to take advantage of the new larger partition, right?)Would parted (or gparted) be a better tool for copying the contents of the partitions?
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Mar 11, 2009
System fedora10
An IDE hard disk
Equipped with two IDE drives (one dvd drive a dvd burner drive which both share an IDE cable) Just using the system - Management - updatesystem the software upgrade of the upgrade is complete to allow the resumption of a problem was the
1, the normal boot drive two lights are flashing above but after the restart only the DVD drive light flickering burner did not react
2, when the show after the show graphics motherboard models that can enter the boss that dell card will be nearly 2 minutes (the past, each time on boot or restart the screen only shows a few seconds) then self-organized (here in particular explain if the motherboard model shows that by then dell would have been completely stuck only by restarting)
3, self-completed fedora10 select Start (here Please note that if the first question will not be the normal boot into the fedora restart if it is then that some characters will be displayed after the duplicate has been duplicate unless you press the restart)
4, in the end this thing have updatesystem Why are used with the yum update to update how things ah not the same as how to turn off the options I have at him inside the selection are not updated but not used
Say over these problems are in the use of upgraded updatesystem caused ago have never been Open the case I have put the hard disk drive memory and so on have won the cup to another mounted on a boss, or no longer put into the restoration of the factory set up is not effective
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Feb 6, 2011
The first time I attempted to install the OS I got to a blank screen with a cursor (But the install completed sucessfully)On my second Attempt i managed to get to grub-rescue.Basically I created a new partition for the OS, it was an ext4 filesystem, and the mount point was "/" it was a primary partition. Then I created a swap area. The boot went to my External HDD. And upon restarting and booting into grub-rescue.The third time I can't exactly remember what happened but my hdd didn't even appear in my boot option list.
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Jun 5, 2010
Recently upgraded to 11.2, but I think it was a downgrade. VMware 6.5.2 was working great on 11.1. On 11.2 it just fails miserably both during the install and trying to build the modules. So I downloaded VMware 6.5.4 and it hangs even worse during the VMware-Player configuration (doing a make I think).So, let's try out VMware 7. It installed great. Unfortunately I didn't read the release notes - it requires a PAE processor, which I don't have So tried to uninstall VMware 7 so I could try just the VMware-Player free product. VMware was not installed with rpm so rpm can't uninstall it. Then removed all the files manually as per this VMware KB: Manually uninstalling VMware Workstation from Linux hosts VMware-Player installation issues a popup saying "component vmware-workstation 7.0.0 has unsatisfied dependency: vmware-player-app=3.0.0." Before I go back to 11.1 or to some other distro, would anyone know how to really get rid of VMware 7 so that I can try the player only?
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Mar 15, 2010
I have Karmic installed, but still using old grub from Jaunty. I decided to get rid of my Vista dual boot so I used gparted, deleted the partitions and moved and enlarged my Ubuntu ones. Grub then didn't work, presumably because I deleted the MBR. I then installed Opensuse 11.2, which I assume still uses old grub too. This gave an Opensuse option which worked, and a Karmic option which took me to the Karmic bootloader, but Karmic did not load. I then tried some instructions to repair grub using the Ubuntu installer, installing grub to my extended partition. This tells me there is no operating system found. I then tried following the instructions at [URL].
My fdisk -l looks like:
dev/sda4 * Extended partition
dev/sda5 Ubuntu /
dev/sda6 Ubuntu /home
[Code].....
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Mar 1, 2011
As of this morning, whenever I open a terminal window, the letter 'p' no longer works. Uppercase 'P' works fine in a terminal window, but lowercase 'p' doesn't do a thing. It isn't my keyboard, either (I can type 'p' here fine).I tried checking the "Keyboard Shortcuts" (Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts..) for the terminal window, but 'p' is not assigned.
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Jul 1, 2010
I've been running a Mythbuntu server for a while and have decided to add a second tuner card. Unfortunately I only have 1 x PCIe slot left on my motherboard so the Dvico Fusion DVB-T Plus card is about the only thing I can use without replacing my MB.Anyway, this card should be supported. But I can't for the life of me get it to work. There is a driver that should work: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/Linux-DVB/DVICO/However when I attempt to make the source I get an error which seems to refer to the incorrect kernel headers. My box uses 2.6.32-23-generic, but the error refers to 2.6.32-22-generic.Here is the output when I attempt to run the 'make' command, I have followed the tutorial mentioned in the link above exactly.
Code:
root@alma:/opt/source/xc-test# make
make -C /opt/source/xc-test/v4l
[code]....
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Nov 7, 2010
I decided to give Ubuntu another try and installed the Studio version. During my installation it asked whether I wanted the Realtime kernel or not. I chose yes as I figured it could come in handy when I work with audio.However since this version isn't exactly Ubuntu 10.10 as promoted , I decided to install Ubuntu Desktop on top of it (trough apt-get). For the full experience. ( im not even sure if it just installed extra software and added some folders)Now my questions are:1:The Realtime kernel is it now overwritten by any other kernel that came with the Desktop installation?
2: How will the updates handle my installation once i want to upgrade to, lets say, 11.04.I'm not really sure about how the system will look at things to upgrade. Will it look at my Desktop installation or my Ubuntu Studio? ( concerning the Realtime kernel as well).Just to add some more: I'm a total Linux Noob(although im not scared to use the Terminal)
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May 4, 2010
how to move the thread [URL]...
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Nov 2, 2010
The shortcomings of Macro Sh1te software forced me to rearrange my HDs. HD0 is the boot drive and contains MS stuff. HD1 is my Fedora drive. I ran an apparently good install onto HD1. Unfortunately, I can't get FireFox to connect to the WWW. I tried to use the admin. view to get eth0 working, without success. As I would for windoze, do I need to download and manually install a driver for the RealTek network adapter chips on my AUSA M4A785-M mobo?
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Jun 3, 2010
I have a Linksys WUSB54GC usb dongle and I have exhausted every thing I know about making this thing work in linux. I am using Fedora 13. Since it is not ready I can not view any networks. Any ideas would be great.
lspci -v does not list the the item. tail of the system log
Jun 2 20:14:35 localhost kernel: usb 1-7: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
Jun 2 20:14:35 localhost kernel: usb 1-7: New USB device found, idVendor=1737, idProduct=0077
Jun 2 20:14:35 localhost kernel: usb 1-7: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Jun 2 20:14:35 localhost kernel: usb 1-7: Product: 802.11 g WLAN
Jun 2 20:14:35 localhost kernel: usb 1-7: Manufacturer: Ralink
[Code]...
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Mar 15, 2010
So I am trying to setup a Samba server to share out our SAN environment to our windows clients. This is my first time playing with samba, so running into quite a few obsticals along the way.
Environment:
SLES 10.3
Samba 3.0x (Original RPMs in distro)
My end goal is to allow anyone in our Active Directory environment to access the shared folders from Samba and map the File permissions to 755 and Directory to 777.First I tried just using Kerberos client and winbind and added it to the AD domain. This worked, but mapped the wrong UIDs (the standard 10000 series). Also the permissions were mapped all wrong.Then I had the great idea to use the Server for NIS on windows 2008, it makes the PDC run a NIS domain that is conjoined to AD. This really didnt work at all. I loaded the AD schema with the correct UIDs and all that good stuff, but didnt seem to take.
So how would any of you approach this?Should I keep trying the NIS config, or use Kerb and winbind? Can a box be part of a NIS domain and AD at the same time?
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Oct 19, 2010
I have OpenVPN set up on my server at home to allow me into my home network when I'm away from home. When I set it up, I tested it using my friend's wifi so I know it works on a local geographic scale.Now I'm away from home, the TLS handshake fails to complete within 60 seconds. I assume it's timing out, as I can tracepath to the server on port 1194 successfully.From reading the OpenVPN documentation, I thought that adding "tls-timeout=120" to the client's config file would double the time allowed,but the handshake still fails with the same error message:
Code:
Tue Oct 19 10:45:17 2010 us=930956 TLS Error: TLS key negotiation failed to occur within 60 seconds (check your network connectivity)
Tue Oct 19 10:45:17 2010 us=931012 TLS Error: TLS handshake failed
Why is the option not being read correctly from the file - does it need to be in the server's config file also?
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Mar 20, 2010
I have minor problem with upgrading a hard drive. I am running an old pentium lll with two hard drives. On the first hard drive I have two partitions of around 90GB each. On the first partition is installed winXP and on the second partition I have Suse 10.3, both booted by grub and living happily side by side. My second hard drive (which is formatted for windows is only 4GB.
My problem arises when I try to replace the 4GB with a 80Gb hard drive. When I disconnect the 4GB drive the system fails to boot up and complains with error 21.
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Feb 22, 2011
I have a rather interesting issue. I have set up a home network and a fedora 14 box as a server. I am running the version of Sendmail that came with fedora 14. I wrote a PHP script that changes http access passwords(to give authorized access to the outside by multiple users) once a week and emails the users their new passwords. It also finds out my WAN IP (because it is dynamic, and I am using a Linksys router with NAT), and E-Mails users when this has changed along with the new access password. I have Sendmail set up so that it should log on to my websites mail server (smtp.example.net) and send the email through it.
The problem I am having is that I have set up my home server with an internal domain like exampledomain.home, but the wan IP reverse lookup returns xx.xxx.xxx.xxx.static.xxx.xx.charter.com, so that when my sendmail server connects to my smtp server for my website it gives "EHLO server.exampledomain.home" then my smtp server rejects it because the connecting IP (WAN IP) resolves toxxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.static.opls.la.charter.com gives a host not found error. Or it gives the error because server.exampledomain.home is obviously not a valid host name on the internet. I was hoping someone out there had some insight on how I could get around this without editing or adding any DNS entries to my websites domain. I would also like to avoid getting a static IP for my house as it is more expensive. I thought about making a dynamic DNS entry with dyndns.com and then making Sendmail use that host name. I dont know how to trick sendmail like that though.Here is a copy of my sendmail.mc (scrubbed of course).
divert(-1)dnl
dnl #
dnl # This is the sendmail macro config file for m4. If you make changes to
[code].....
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