Grrr

[mdlbear]

I finally kicked Windows entirely off my laptop (an aging but delightfully small Ricoh Magio), upgraded my antique RedHat 5.1 install to Debian, got it configured to the point where it was completely useable, ...

And now it won't boot. It was sitting there on my desk working, shut itself off, and can't be turned on again. No power lights, nothing. I tried swapping power supplies (since it's behaving like the PS had died and the batteries had drained) but no joy.

It's conceivable that the batteries have both crapped out and that it won't run on AC alone, but unlikely.

So in all likelihood I'm going to be facing the choice of how to replace the damned thing. Since it's actually owned by my employer, and I've just upgraded my desktop system at considerable expense to them, it's not entirely clear where I go from here. Especially since I really don't get a whole lot of use out of a laptop these days.

Comments

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Hmmn—sure that was a Debian installation and not a Denebian one? There's a several-day incubation period for some Denebian virus. I forget what it is...

ducking and running like a bat out of Houston, tossing back one comment at least: Hope you can secure another laptop or other mobile device to your satisfaction.

[mdlbear]

I'll ask some of my Vegan friends whether they know anything about it.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Many laptops have an autosave feature where they detect low battery and attempt in hardware to take the currently running Windows system and copy an image of what's in memory off to HD. Then when you re-power the system it attempts to copy the image back into memory so it looks like you restart from where you left off.

Did you notice a second small partition at the end of the drive when you Fdisk'd it? That's what it is used for.

This usually only works in Windows. It could explain the hangup you got. Shut itself down, tried to copy the image over, and now it can't restart from that image or it hung when it discovered there was no partition to copy to. (The image is not bootable.)

The fix is to boot into the BIOS using whatever the override key configuration is and force it to boot from floppy. Then turn off the suspend/restore feature using the BIOS (if the manufacturer was bright) or a Windows utility (if not so bright).

This is why my old Windows laptop was set up as dual-boot using System Commander. Saved my bacon repeatedly.

Of course, since it's the company's laptop, you can just throw it at the IT guys.

Here's hoping it's an easy fix.

Nope.

[mdlbear]

I preserved a small DOS partition with the hibernation file in it; the problem is that it doesn't respond at all to the powerup button -- if it brought up the BIOS I could have dealt with the problem. Besides, I know what it looks like when it's waking up from hibernation.

Basically it's behaving like a brick. An expensive brick, but a brick.

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What IT guys? We're talking a 30-person research lab here, with one overworked sysadmin.

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My plan is to scrounge around the lab looking for some old laptop to use as a replacement -- as I believe I mentioned, I don't use it very heavily, and never under Windows.

[mdlbear]

I suppose I should mention that, since I took it to Westercon and did a little work on it over the last week, the first thing I did when I got home was a CVS commit to sync up. So I didn't lose any of my edits.

And the last thing I did before installing Debian, the day before I left for Westercon, was to tar off both the DOS and Linux partitions to a convenient spot on my desktop box. The only thing I didn't save was the set of tweaks I made to the config files in the new install. Total lost work, maybe an hour.