mdsh.com/wiki

ubuntu:install 7.04 on pcg-z600ne

The Sony PCG-Z600NE is a Pentium III 500MHz laptop, originally bought with Windows 98 SE but latterly it had Windows XP Pro on it. This machine's original 128MB RAM has been upgraded to 256MB. Its original 12GB hard disk started to fail, having sectors that cannot read, so it has been replaced with an 80GB disk.

The PCG-Z600NE would boot from the Ubuntu 7.04 CD in the Sony PCGA-CD51/A CD-ROM but once Linux had booted it locked up.

Linux was hanging at attempting ACPI stuff, I discovered this by removing "quiet splash " from the F6 Boot prompt, so I replaced that with "acpi=off" and Linux booted but dropped me into a shell rather than running the install.

Linux was not finding the PCMCIA PC Card CD-ROM, /dev/cdrom did not exist, nore did /dev/hdc. Adding ide2=0x180,0x386 did not make the CD work.

After much head scratching I copied the contents of the CD onto a 2GB USB flash disk, booted from the CD and at the F6 Boot prompt I entered removed the "quiet splash " parameters and added "acpi=off INSTALL_MEDIA_DEV=/dev/sda1".

The install, although rather slow off the USB flash disk, went smoothly.

At the next boot I had to edit the grub configuration to add "acpi=off", and when the laptop booted I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to include that option.

Everything appears to be working, including the screen, sound, PCMCIA PC Card (it finds the Sony PCGA-CD51/A CD-ROM and a Buffalo 802.11B WiFi card), ALPS glide pad, USB. Not tried firewire or Memory Stick yet. There does seem to be an issue with it not turning the laptop off when I shutdown.

Later I installed the following:

$ sudo apt-get install vlc
$ sudo apt-get install eclipse
$ sudo apt-get install autofs
$ sudo apt-get install smbfs

Java

I'm new to the Ubuntu/Debian way of installing and having alternative packages. I want to use Sun's Java, so:

$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun
$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0-b105)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0-b105, mixed mode, sharing)

dd_rescue

AS I said, the previous hard disk in this laptop had started to fail and I replaced it. When I bought the replacement disk I also bought a USB 2 caddy (under £10.00) and I put the old disk in there.

The old disk is NTFS and holds a Windows XP installation. I want to recover the data and turn that old Windows XP inslallation into a virtual machine, probably running in VMWare Player on Linux.

The disk has bad sectors that dd cannot read so I got hold of dd_rescue:

$ sudo apt-get install ddrescue

Plugged the old disk in its USB caddy into the Ubuntu laptop and it is detected as a SCSI drive /dev/sda.

mdsh@vaio1:~/tmp$ dd_rescue -A -v -w /dev/sda1 sda1
dd_rescue: (info): about to transfer 0.0 kBytes from /dev/sda1 to sda1
dd_rescue: (info): blocksizes: soft 65536, hard 512
dd_rescue: (info): starting positions: in 0.0k, out 0.0k
dd_rescue: (info): Logfile: (none), Maxerr: 0
dd_rescue: (info): Reverse: no , Trunc: no , interactive: no
dd_rescue: (info): abort on Write errs: yes, spArse write: never
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 11775552.0k, opos: 11775552.0k, xferd: 11775552.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 11775552.0k
+curr.rate: 1010kB/s, avg.rate: 1001kB/s, avg.load: 3.3%
dd_rescue: (info): problems at ipos 11775552.0k: Success
fall back to smaller blocksize



dd_rescue: (info): /dev/sda1 (11775613.5k): EOF
Summary for /dev/sda1 -> sda1:
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 11775613.5k, opos: 11775613.5k, xferd: 11775613.5k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 11775613.5k
+curr.rate: 8165kB/s, avg.rate: 1001kB/s, avg.load: 3.3%
mdsh@vaio1:~/tmp$


ubuntu:install 7.04 on pcg-z600ne is mentioned on: Linux