Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows XP Dual-Boot: GRUB2 Woes

I was installing Windows XP SP3 and Ubuntu.  I encountered some error messages early in the process.  This post describes the steps I took in an attempt to resolve those problems.

First, I got this error:

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer.

In my search for a solution, I found a thread offering a number of suggestions.  The one that worked for me was to go into the BIOS (hit Del at startup) and make sure the SATA controller was set to ATA, not AHCI.  Mine had started out as ATA, but a notice had popped up when I was first booting it, offering to change it to the AHCI, and I had accepted.  After I fixed this, the next bootup problem was this message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

\system32\hal.dll
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

My search on that led to a page offering a number of suggestions.  I started with just rebooting.  That didn't fix it.  suggesting that I go into the BIOS and switch the order in which the BIOS would try to boot my hard drives.  This led to a new message:

error: no such device: [UUID number]

grub rescue>

This apparently happened because I had previously installed Ubuntu on that hard drive.  For this one, I took the advice to boot from the WinXP installation CD, choose R to repair an existing installation, choose the existing installation (no administrator password), and type this sequence of commands:

D:\WINDOWS> C:

C:\> CD \

C:\> FIXBOOT C:

C:\> FIXMBR

C:\> BOOTCFG /rebuild

The last one led to an offer to add D:\WINDOWS to the boot list.  I took that offer.  But then it asked "Enter Load Identifier" and "Enter OS Load Options."  I didn't know what to add, so I just hit Enter for each.  This led to a new error message:

Error: Failed to add the selected boot entry to the boot list.

I guessed that the system was seeing the Windows installation on drive D because I had reversed the boot order in the BIOS.  I did think I had cabled them correctly, with the Windows drive going to SATA0 (i.e., the first SATA connector) on the motherboard.  I looked into Load Identifier and found a Microsoft page with information on that and other parts of this situation.  It told me to type the name of my operating system:  Microsoft Windows XP Professional, though apparently anything would do.  For OS Load Options, it said, type /fastdetect.  Unfortunately, this was not satisfactory.  I got the "failed" error again.

The responses to this seemed to lean in the direction of editing the boot.ini file.  A thread on that gave me the idea of just copying my boot.ini file from another computer.  A Microsoft page gave information on editing it if I was already in WinXP, which I wasn't.  A webpage devoted to boot.ini said it should be possible to just delete the boot.ini file in order to boot the system.  The webpage also gave some sample boot.ini files.  I typed "help" at the prompt and got a list of options.  There didn't seem to be an editor in the Repair Console.  I typed "dir" to verify that boot.ini was there, and then typed "type boot.ini" to see what was in it.  It didn't look very complicated.  What's more, it looked like my XP Pro entry was already there, which could explain why my BOOTCFG command didn't work.  I pressed the up arrow to retrieve my BOOTCFG command and hit Enter to run that again, just in case.  It failed again.

I typed "exit" and shut down the computer and swapped cables so that maybe this drive would show up as C rather than D.  That merely resurrected the "no such device" GRUB error.  I decided to explore that one for a while.  A search led to some commands that I could have entered, but then I saw a suggestion that maybe I could fix it by just installing Ubuntu, which I had planned to do anyway, and let it sort itself out.  So I went ahead with that, following the Ubuntu installation approach I had worked out previously.  But at this point I only did the initial installation from the CD, and then rebooted to see what the Windows situation was now.  Sadly, I still had the "no such device" error.

I guessed that the problem was that I was using two drives.  One of them had perfectly reasonable Windows and Ubuntu installations on it.  The other had leftovers from some previous Ubuntu installation.  I didn't know for sure, but on that hunch I unplugged the second drive and rebooted.  But no, that gave me the "no such device" error either way, no matter which disk I plugged in.  I plugged in both drives, rebooted with the live CD, and ran System > Administration > GParted to take a look.  Interestingly, it showed that a partition on the second drive was marked as a boot drive, when it should not have been.  I changed that.  It didn't make a difference.

Ultimately, I plugged in a USB drive while booted with the Ubuntu live CD, copied over the data files, wiped both of the drives in the machine, and reinstalled WinXP and Ubuntu, in that order.  That solved the problem.

Windows XP & Ubuntu RAID 0 Dual Boot: Error: No Such Device

I had set up a dual-boot system with Ubuntu 10.04 on a two-drive RAID 0 array and Windows XP SP3 running from a third hard drive.  I replaced the WinXP drive with a different one, copying the files over from the old drive's partitions to the new one, and rebooted.  When I selected the Windows XP option in the GRUB2 boot menu, I got an error message:

error: no such device: [apparently a UUID number]

error: invalid signature.

Press any key to continue...

As described in comment 90, within a long thread on this Ubuntu bug, with an alternate approach in another post, the solution to this problem was said to involve editing grub-mkconfig_lib.  Since I was able to get into Ubuntu (though not Windows), I took the approach described in comment 90.  In Ubuntu, in Terminal, I typed these commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install grub-common

The first command ended with errors along the lines of "could not connect to archive.getdeb.net."  This turned out to be an indication that the getdeb repository was down.  I repaired it by editing sources.list to refer to a mirror site instead.  Next, I typed this:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib

and changed gedit's Edit > Preferences to show line numbers.  I went down to line 174, ready to insert a # sign before whatever was on that line.  But it was just "fi" which, I thought, marke the end of an "if" statement.  What they wanted me to add did not look like it belonged there.  The long thread had not been visited for nearly four months; I suspected the file had been changed in a bid to fix the problem.

I got that error in the first place, as noted above, not because of an obvious malfunction in GRUB2, but because I had moved the partition containing the Windows XP program files.  I heard that just typing "sudo update-grub" would cause GRUB2 to search for operating systems.  And it did:  in the process of "Generating grub.cfg," it reported that it found Windows XP on /dev/sdc1.  I wondered if that would fix the problem by itself, so I rebooted and selected the Windows option again from the GRUB menu.  And that was it.  Problem solved!

Ubuntu 10.04 Installation: The Streamlined Version

In another recent post, I described the process of installing Ubuntu 10.04.  This post offers a streamlined version of that post.  That is, it describes another such installation, performed on the basis of that post.

The first step was to install Ubuntu from the live CD.  As before, in this step I installed everything into one root partition.  When installation was complete, I copied my saved fstab from a separate partition to replace the existing /etc/fstab, and then typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab."  There, I replaced the UUID for the root partition with the new one shown in another Terminal session via "sudo blkid."  I saved and closed fstab.  This part still did not go smoothly -- I still had not mastered the translation of the Ubuntu Community Documentation webpage into terms that fit my situation -- but essentially I typed "cd /" and then "sudo mv /home /old_home" to park the newly installed but largely empty /home folder; then "sudo mkdir /media/home."  On reboot, my desktop was restored to its previous condition.  I deleted the /old_home folder.

Next, I went to the folder where I had saved my backup copy of sources.list and typed "sudo cp sources.list /etc/apt/."  I opened sources.list, copied the commented command lines, and ran them.  They generated what appeared to be error messages.  In Software Sources, I triggered a reload.  It closed without errors.  In Synaptic, I installed these programs:  acroread, acroread-fonts, adobe-flashplugin, boinc, dvgrab, fdutils, gparted, mplayer, nautilus-open-terminal, ntfs-config, p7zip-full, sysinfo, ubuntu-tweak, unetbootin, and webhttrack, as well as these font packages:  ttf-mscorefonts-installer, sun-java6-fonts, ttf-sil-gentium, ttf-sil-gentium-basic, ttf-dustin, and ttf-georgewilliams.  As before, I typed "sudo sh" to install my .bin and .bundle downloads (e.g., GoogleEarthLinux.bin) and double-clicked to install my .deb downloads.  Then I went into Update Manager, and ran and reran it until I was all caught up.

Monitor driver installation and BOINC configuration were as described in the "Settings and Adjustments" section of the previous post.  The GRUB2 menu edits, as described more carefully in that post, were as follows:  to get rid of the Memtest+ options, I typed "sudo chmod -x /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+."  To let Ubuntu remember which operating system it had used last, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/default/grub," changed the first line to be "GRUB_DEFAULT=saved," and added a second line that said "GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true.  To limit the number of Ubuntu kernels shown, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/10_linux," added "GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_RECOVERY=true" at the top, and changed two lines at the bottom to be three that read as follows:

list=`echo $list | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -vx $linux | tr '\n' ' '`
list=`version_find_latest $list`
done

I saved and closed that and typed "sudo update-grub."  I typed "sudo vmware" and made some root adjustments there.  I rebooted and everything looked good.  There were a few rough spots, but I could see that this might not take very long at all, once you got the hang of it.

Ubuntu 10.04: UDEVADM Trigger Is Not Permitted While UDEV Is Unconfigured

In the process of installing Ubuntu 10.04, I got an error message:  "udevadm trigger is not permitted while udev is unconfigured."  Trying to reboot into Windows XP on that dual-boot computer led to the same error message.  This post describes my efforts to resolve that error.

As I looked into it, I found some indications that this was due to a bug in Ubuntu.  In my case, the immediate trigger seemed to be the decision to use an "installed-software" package (as described in the main installation post) to restore many of my previously installed programs at once.  Alternately, it may have been due to the concomitant effort to set up a separate home partition.

At least one user fixed this problem by using a different kernel.  I didn't seem to have any other kernels on my machine at this point, so I started over and re-did the basic Ubuntu installation.  This time, I installed everything to the root partition.  I rebooted, copied over my backup of fstab, changed it to reflect the new root partition's UUID, and rebooted.  Having discovered that I had made some mistakes in the separate home partition process, I tried that once more, and now that worked too.  I rebooted and ran installed-software (above).  This time, I declined to erase previously downloaded .deb files.  I rebooted again.  Unfortunately, I now had that udevadm message again.  Examining it more closely, I saw that, after a minute or two, it went on to say this:

ALERT!  /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxxxxx does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

where "xxxxxxxxxxx" stands for a UUID.  Which UUID?  I could not figure out how to do things in the shell that opened up, so I rebooted with the Ubuntu Live CD.

According to fstab, the UUID belonged to my Ubuntu programs partition.  I typed "sudo blkid" and compared its output.  Fstab was correct:  it was identifying the UUID for that partition.  So when Ubuntu would try to boot, it would not find itself.  How was that possible?  This seemed to be a GRUB problem.  Following advice, I opened /etc/default/Grub and uncommented (i.e., removed the leading # sign from) the line that read "GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true."

I was then supposed to run update-grub, but I didn't know how to do that from a Live CD boot.  One post said that it was possible; I needed to do so "from inside a chroot environment."  Wikipedia seemed to say that chroot means "change root"; the idea was that I would use chroot so that, when I was running a program (e.g., update-grub) as root, the "root user" doing so would be that of the hard drive, not of the CD.  A Community Documentation page told me that it was "a special directory on your computer which prevents applications, if run from inside that directory, from accessing files outside that directory . . . like installing another operating system inside your existing operating system."  In other words, I needed to use chroot and then run update-grub as the root of my Ubuntu installation.  Unfortunately, the procedure described in that Community Documentation page required me to begin by installing dchroot and debootstrap, and I wasn't able to do that.

Something made me think that Super Grub Disk, which I had forgotten about, could provide a solution.  Looking into that led me to Rescatux instead.  But then the Super Grub Disk wiki said that Auto Super Grub Disk (ASGD) was the easiest solution for a Windows user.  Working on another computer, I downloaded it.  I expected an ISO, but it was an executable (.exe) file, so I ran it.  It gave me a dialog that seemed to be wiling to install ASGD on a USB drive, so I plugged one in, designated ASGD (not SGD) and USB (not hard drive) as my options (I had to restart ASGD to get it to see the drive), and clicked OK.  After a minute, it said "Installation Complete, Reboot."  So I plugged the USB drive into the troubled computer and did that, making sure to choose USB (actually, USB-HDD) as my first boot device in BIOS.  But it said, "BOOTMGR is missing."

So now I did try Rescatux.  I downloaded it, burned it to a CD, and booted it.  Its wizard came up, and I killed it.  But then it turned out that the wizard was the main thing, though the program did have a nice interface reminiscent of BartPE, with an applications menu and so forth.  Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get the wizard back, so I had to restart it.  (The instructions on the SGD wiki were incorrect, and it was apparently not possible to edit pages or become a new user of the wiki.)  This time, from the Rescatux wizard, I chose GRUB options > grub-install > run.  It auto-selected my Ubuntu partition.  But then it said, "Which hard disk to install Linux on?"  I didn't want it to install Linux anywhere.  It made me nervous.  Anyway, I didn't want it to install GRUB either; I feared that would just wipe out the Windows part of my GRUB menu and give me a new problem to fix.

I tried again, this time with Super GRUB2 Disk.  The SGD wiki advised me to enter certain commands from the prompt, but did not say how to get to a prompt.  I tried the SGD option for "Detect any GRUB2 configuration file (grub.cfg)."  It found only one and seemed to be offering to load it.  I went with that.  It ran the GRUB menu OK and that took me to the udevadm error message.  Great.  I rebooted the SGD and tried the "Enable serial terminal" option.  But that just brought me back to the menu.  Tried it again; same result.

Back to the drawing board.  I found a different Ubuntu wiki page on how to recover GRUB2 via Live CD.  This seemed more on target.  It called for booting the Ubuntu Live CD, opening Terminal, and typing "sudo blkid" to get the device where Ubuntu was installed.  In my case, it was /dev/sdb8.  So then I typed "sudo mount /dev/sdb8 /mnt."  I didn't have /boot or /var on separate partitions, so I could just go directly to these commands:

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/devsudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/procsudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/syssudo chroot /mntupdate-grubexitsudo umount /mnt/devsudo umount /mnt/syssudo umount /mnt/procsudo umount /mnt

Then I rebooted.  Went through the GRUB menu; still got the UDEVADM message.  Back at the starting point, I tried searching again for answers to that error message.  Following an approach that seemed to work for some people, I started by booting the system and getting to my GRUB menu.  I hit the down-arrow key to stop the clock so that I could copy down the number of the Linux kernel I was trying to install.  In my case, it was 2.6.32-24-generic-pae.  (Alternately, I could have just typed "ls /boot" as one of the following commands.)  Having already found that Ubuntu was installed on /dev/sdb8, I rebooted with the Live CD, opened Terminal, and typed this:

sudo mkdir /media/newrootsudo mount /dev/sdb8 /media/newrootsudo chroot /media/newrootapt-get updateapt-get dist-upgrade

I rebooted and sat back to watch.  No joy.  Still got UDEVADM.  I rebooted the live CD and tried a modification of those commands:  redid the first three, down through the chroot step, but then typed "sudo update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.32-24-generic-pae."  This brought several error messages:  "Unable to resolve host ubuntu" and "No such file or directory" (in connection with an automatically generated "grep:  /proc/modules" command).  I rebooted, wishing these error messages wouldn't matter -- and, woo hoo! what do you know, they didn't!  I was booting into Ubuntu.  It ran a check on my disks, and that was the end of the story!

Ubuntu 10.04 & Windows Dual-Boot: Customize GRUB2 Boot Menu

I had a dual-boot machine with Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on it.  I wanted to clean up and customize the GRUB menu that came up whenever I booted the system.  There were several parts to this.

I started with The Grub 2 Guide.  The Guide's point 6, "Adding Entries to Grub 2," said that files named 10_linux and 30_os-prober would search for installed Linux kernels and other operating systems.  I typed this:

cd /etc/grub.d
ls

and, sure enough, I had files called 10_linux, 20_memtest86+, 30_os-prober, and 40_custom, along with 00_header and 05_debian_theme files.  There seemed to be useful ways to change several of these items, so I went down the list in numerical order, starting with 10_linux.  I typed "sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/10_linux."  The thing to do here was to stop GRUB from listing Recovery Mode options in the startup menu.  I did a Ctrl-F to see if 10_linux contained this line:

GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_RECOVERY=true

It didn't appear to have that, so I added it near the start of the file, right before the first "if" statement.  That was all for 10_linux, so I saved and closed it.  Now, how about controlling the menu so that it wouldn't list older kernels?  At this point, I thought about going with their "Building a Totally Customized Menu" option.  But the Grub 2 Guide said that a fully customized menu would not be updated with the addition of any new kernels.  The reason seemed to be that I would make 10_linux non-executable, so it would no longer go sniffing around to see what's new.   I didn't want to have to mess with updating the list manually every time a new kernel came along.  For guidance, I looked to the Grub 2 Title Tweaks Thread.  That, and the Grub 2 Guide, led to the following approach:

uname -r
sudo update-grub
ubuntu-tweak

The "uname" command told me what kernel I was now using.  At present, that was 2.6.32-22-generic-pae.  The "sudo update-grub" step told me what else was being listed on the Grub menu.  There was the option of seeking out other kernels in Synaptic, but running ubuntu-tweak (available via Synaptic, if you have the right repository) gave me an easier way of removing older kernels.  In Ubuntu Tweak, I went to Applications > Package Cleaner > Unlock > Clean Kernels.  This showed all installed kernels other than the one currently in use.  They said it was a good idea to keep one previously working kernel, so I skipped the first one on the list and checked the others.  Then I clicked Cleanup.  Ubuntu Tweak did its thing, and then I closed it.  It turned out there was another way to do this, that didn't require the Ubuntu Tweak step:  just tell 10_linux how many kernels to display.  This method required me to type "sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/10_linux" and then search for the place that had these two lines:

list=`echo $list | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -vx $linux | tr '\n' ' '`
done

and change it by inserting another list line between those two:

list=`echo $list | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -vx $linux | tr '\n' ' '`
list=`version_find_latest $list`
done

I found that right at the end of the 10_linux file.  So I made that change and then saved and closed 10_linux.  Next, I didn't want memtest+ to appear in the GRUB menu list, so I typed this:

sudo chmod -x /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+

I looked for a quick way to confirm whether a file was executable, but there didn't appear to be an option for that in chmod, and the first several webpages I tried in response to a Google search didn't tell me.  Moving on, GRUB on my laptop had gotten confused, and it now pointed to two different Vista installations, only one of which was working.  The Grub 2 Title Tweaks Thread said I could hide it, but it seemed like I should also be able to remove it.  It seemed like a bad idea to have it hanging around.  Here's how those lines looked in GRUB:

Windows Vista (loader) (on /dev/sda1)
Windows Vista (loader) (on /dev/sda2)

The first one was not working.  If I hit it, I got "Disk error.  Press any key to restart."  I actually had to power down the laptop to get past that.  I didn't yet have a very well configured Ubuntu setup on the laptop, so I rebooted with a GParted CD (an Ubuntu Live CD would have worked too).  In GParted, I looked at sda1 and, well, no wonder it was showing up.  I had a Windows XP installation on a hidden partition in there!  I'd had some troubles installing Vista on the laptop, and apparently I had decided to keep the WinXP installation just in case.  So, OK, that was interesting.  I could have tried to rejigger the setup so that I'd have a triple boot system, but I didn't plan to be using XP very often on the laptop, and I could use GParted within Ubuntu (once I finished tweaking the laptop) to hide and unhide as needed.  For now, what I needed to do, in the GRUB menu, was to change the entry so that it would report the situation more informatively.  I typed this:

sudo cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg | grep "menuentry" | cut -d '"' -f 2
sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober

The first line gave me the current list of GRUB menu entries from grub.cfg (in case I hadn't already written down the names I wanted to change).  Precisely what I wanted to change was the first of the two "Windows Vista (loader)" entries.  So:  around the middle of 30_os-prober, I found this:

for OS in ${OSPROBED} ; do
  DEVICE="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 1`"
  LONGNAME="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 2 | tr '^' ' '`"
  LABEL="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 3 | tr '^' ' '`"
  BOOT="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 4`"
  if [ -z "${LONGNAME}" ] ; then
    LONGNAME="${LABEL}"
  fi

Following their advice, I could have changed those last three lines to five lines that read as follows:

  if [ "${LONGNAME}" = "Windows Vista (loader)" ] ; then

    LONGNAME="Windows XP (hidden)"

  elif [ -z "${LONGNAME}" ] ; then

    LONGNAME="${LABEL}"

  fi

In this case, unfortunately, both of those items were named "Windows Vista (loader)," so I figured they would both change to "Windows XP (hidden)."  What I needed had to be more specific, so instead I left their last three lines unchanged and added this after them:

  if [ "$LONGNAME" = "Windows Vista (loader)" ] && [ "${DEVICE}" = "/dev/sda1" ] ; then

    LONGNAME="Windows XP (hidden)"

  fi

And that worked.  The one other thing I wanted to change was to get GRUB to remember which operating system choice I had used last time, and default to that one again this time unless I selected something else.  In previous Ubuntu installations, the steps I had taken to do that had been to type "sudo gedit /etc/default/grub"; change one line to say GRUB_DEFAULT=saved instead of GRUB_DEFAULT=0; save and close that file; and then type "sudo update-grub."  But now I saw this in the Grub 2 Guide:  "The default OS will not be set merely by an interactive selection of an OS from the menu."  So that was apparently a change from Grub 1.5, or whatever I had been using previously.  So now, one option was to set up a custom menu, except that it wouldn't be updated for the latest kernels.  But then, confusingly, the Grub 2 Basics seemed to say that there was a simple solution after all.  I typed "sudo gedit /etc/default/grub" and made sure it said that "GRUB_DEFAULT=saved" and I also added a line right after that (since there wasn't already a line for this):

GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true

So I saved that, typed "sudo update-grub," and watched as it generated its list.  It looked like it was only going to show one Linux image, but I reserved judgment and rebooted.  Sure enough (speaking, here, of the desktop computer on which I had been making most of these changes), GRUB now showed only two items:  the latest Ubuntu kernel and Windows XP.  I chose Windows, the second of the two items.  I hit Enter and immediately hit F8, in the theory that Safe Mode would load faster than Normal Mode.  I guess it did, but it still wasn't in a hell of a hurry.  I clicked "Turn off computer" > Restart and watched to see if GRUB would remember that I had just booted Windows, not Ubuntu.  It did.  Excellent.  That seemed to be working.  I chose Ubuntu instead and rebooted again.  This time it went into Ubuntu.  Likewise, on the laptop, after some tinkering, sudo update-grub eventually produced the desired list, and it remembered the last boot too.

Resuming a VMware Virtual Machine: Could Not Open /dev/vmmon

I was tweaking Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid).  One step I took was to clean out old entries from the GRUB menu.  This involved removing some old kernels.  That process may have caused a problem for VMware Workstation 7.  When I tried to resume a previously suspended virtual machine, I got this error:

Could not open /dev/vmmon:  No such file or directory.  Please make sure that the kernel module `vmmon’ is loaded.

One source recommended adding some extra lines to the VMware startup script.  I killed VMware and tried that.  I typed “sudo gedit /etc./init.d/vmware and added those lines at the start of that file, right after the end of the introductory comments.  But it didn’t work, and I wasn’t surprised; the code seemed a bit scrambled.  I closed Workstation and tried “sudo vmware.”  But that didn’t help either.  What did finally solve the problem was a simple command:  “sudo service vmware start.”  Then I started VMware and was able to restore my virtual machine OK.

Configuring 64-Bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

In a previous post, I described the steps I followed in setting up x64 Ubuntu 9.04 (as refined in a later post).  This post does the same for Ubuntu 9.10.  I won't re-describe steps that are already spelled out in some detail in that previous post and in the other webpages to which it refers.  I'll still provide most of the details here, just not as much in-depth explanation.

Deciding on a Clean Install.  I was installing on a machine where I had previously been running 9.04.  I installed 9.04 on top of 8.10 on that machine, and this seemed to lead to some unusual problems -- you know, the kind of issue that brings up almost nothing in a Google search.  The better approach was apparently to do a clean install.  So now it was time to do that, replacing 9.04 with 9.10.

My first question was, what should I preserve from my previous setup, and how can I preserve it?  One suggestion was to try this:

tar cf /media/[backup drive]/[backup folder]/[backup filename].tar /etc /home

That didn't work for me, as my /home directory contained 32GB.  Another post in that same thread suggested installing your stuff to a separate /home partition, so that your settings wouldn't be wiped out by future clean installations.  I found a guide to moving the /home partition.  I started to use GParted to make a 50GB /home partition.  I chose ext3 because ext4 still seemed to have some issues.  I discovered that Ubuntu's manual installer has an option not to format the partition you're installing to, so as to preserve your old settings.  I decided against both of these approaches because I did want to wipe out my old /home partition, with its mistakes and assorted junk.  So I installed Ubuntu as described in the previous post, working from a CD.  I went into System > Administration > Update Manager > Check.  This gave me 184 updates and a reboot.

Software Sources.  Next, I went into Applications > Ubuntu Software Center > Get Free Software > search for "restricted extras" > select Ubuntu restricted extras > Install.  Next, System > Administration > Hardware Drivers > NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 185) (because I had an NVIDIA video card) > Activate > Close.  Next, System > Administration > Software Sources > Ubuntu Software tab > Download From > Other > Select Best Server > Choose Server (whichever one it highlights) > Close.  Also, in Software Sources, go to the Other Software tab, select the two entries that are already there, and click Add to add more.  The additional lines come from the X-Updates website.  There, click on "Technical details about this PPA," specify Karmic, and copy the two deb lines there, one at a time, into the APT line, clicking "Add Source" after each.  Next, on that same webpage, follow the Signing Key instructions, just below the deb lines.  Click Close.  This will bring up "The information about available software is out-of-date."  Click Reload.  If you don't get a "Reload" option when you click Close, go back into Third-Party Software and unclick and then re-click some item and try again.

Synaptic.  I had read an upgrade tip that said I could automatically reinstall my installed Synaptic applications by using System > Administration Synaptic Package Manager > File > Save Markings As > Save full state and then, after the upgrade, use Synaptic > File > Read Markings.  I had saved as advised; now I tried the read (restore) step.  It did not work well for me.  After this and a few more misadventures, I wound up reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch.  For posterity, the next few paragraphs describe the failed approach.  After that, I describe the alternate approach, the one that I had used in previous installations. 


To try the Read Markings approach, I started by going to Places > Computer and double-clicking on the drive where I had saved the backup.  Then Apply.  But that gave me an error:  "Could not apply changes!  Fix broken packages first."  So I went into Synaptic > Edit > Fix broken packages.  That, in turn, generated this message:  "An error occurred.  The following details are provided:  E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages."  Adapting some older advice, I closed Synaptic and then typed this:

sudo -i
apt-get clean
apt-get autoclean
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Now I tried Synaptic again.  The steps just taken did not seem to change anything; but after tinkering with the same options, Edit > Fix broken packages seemed to work, and Apply proceeded to download 259 files.  Since the more automated Markings approach seemed to work, the advice for the next installation would be to uninstall any unwanted packages before running the Save Markings step.

Instead of all that, on the second installation I selected and installed these packages from within Synaptic:  boinc; boinc-manager; fdutils (if you expect to be using a floppy drive); gparted; ntfs-config; ntfsprogs; p7zip-full; sysinfo; and webhttrack. (If numerous items come up in response to your search, click on the Package heading to sort them alphabetically. Also install other related packages, if given the option.) (If some of my later descriptions don't work for you, it may be because you didn't install one of these.)  For my e-mail, I preferred thunderbird, so I added that, and uninstalled evolution.  Some of these may ask if you want to "Mark additional required changes?" Click "Mark" and go on to the next one. Then click Apply. Some of these programs may already be shown as being installed on your system. If so, no problem.

Other Programs.  To install Google Earth, I didn't use a previous download (see above). Instead, I typed these two lines:  First, "wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin," and then "sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin" (as always, without quotation marks).

I didn't have to install Firefox -- it came installed with Karmic -- but, as in the past, I hoped to speed up my customization by using the FEBE add-in.  I had made a FEBE backup before this reinstallation.  Now, to restore my previous settings, I installed FEBE.  Unfortunately, Firefox did not seem to be functioning properly. I address this set of problems in a separate post.  (I think the problem may have been that I tried to use a FEBE backup of a Windows XP Firefox installation.  Firefox on Ubuntu does not use the same add-ons.)  To have a browser, I downloaded 64-bit Opera.  (At this point, 64-bit Google Chrome was apparently unstable.)  Opera came as a .deb file, so I just double-clicked to install it.  On the reinstall, I didn't even bother with FEBE at this point; for the time being, I just used Opera in its basic form.

VMware Workstation 7 came as a .bundle file, which required the same installation steps as .bin files.  First, I typed "chmod +x" [filename] and then "./"[filename]. I designated "/home/[username]" as the installation directory.  (In all cases, fill in the bracketed names with your actual names.)

I didn't have any .tar files to install at this point.  If I had, my notes said I should have used tar -vxf filename.tar.gz (or possibly tar xvfz instead), tar xvf filename.tar, and tar yxf filename.tar.bz2.

Drive Automount.  I wanted some partitions to be mounted automatically at startup.  In the past, I had manually edited /etc/fstab to do this.  This time, I decided to try PySDM, which was apparently short for Python Storage Device Manager (System > Administration > Storage Device Manager).  Unfortunately, my efforts suggested there were serious bugs in PySDM, so I uninstalled it and edited fstab manually.  I began by typing "sudo ntfs-config" and then "sudo gedit /etc/fstab."  I also ran System > Administration > GParted for a GUI reference, to help me see what I was supposed to be doing.  I plugged in all of my USB drives, typed "sudo blkid" to get the universal identifier (UUID) for each partition, and copied and pasted that into fstab.  I refreshed GParted (Ctrl-R) and created a comment line for each partition shown in GParted.  This was about the point when things seemed so grotesquely screwed up (because of PySDM, it seemed) as to warrant a complete reinstallation.  When I rebooted, it looked like everything was getting automatically booted without a problem.  I saved a copy of my resulting fstab in case I had to reinstall again.  I noticed that the booted partitions were all represented by icons on the desktop.  I wanted to remove those, so I typed "gconf-editor" and went into apps/nautilus/desktop, unnclicked volumes_visible, and closed the Configuration Editor, and the icons were gone.



Miscellany.  Ubuntu 9.10 used Grub2, which no longer used menu.lst.  I heard it was no longer possible to edit the Grub menu to remove entries for older kernels; instead, you had to remove the whole kernel, and then the menu entry would go away too.  ||  In System > Preferences > Startup Applications, I added Thunderbird, Firefox, and VMware Workstation.

The next steps are going to be to restore my Thunderbird profile backup and finish the automation of the rsync scripts I have been playing with for some months now.  But those steps will have to come later.