Power Failure Kills My Main Windows Desktop

I have been pretty quiet for the last few weeks. On March 23 we had a power failure. This is not unusual in Tasmania. However after this failure my dual boot Windows XP/Ubuntu PC would not find the Windows partition that I was using when the power went.

I trued to repair it with the Windows XP recovery console. It reported that it could not read the partition. I tried a Live bootable BartPE XP disk. Same result. The Ubuntu partition booted fine, could see the Windows NTFS patition??? and allowed me to copy files to a USB drive. I decided it was time to break the yoke. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 as the only system.

Problems ensued.

When I installed Wine (I have a CD based database application I REALLY need to use) any attempt to run Wine apps resulted in a total lockup. sometimes + 1 would give me a terminal for a shutdown, but mostly, it was a total hang. A little searching on the Internet made it clear that if wine hangs there may be video card issues.

I made a decision to switch my server and workstation. I won't go into details, but the server allowed an external video card to be installed, the workstation,which has a great CPU but a rather bad motherboard (it was the only replacement I could buy when the original failed) would not. This is a small/home office network, performance is not an issue with a maximum of 4 users

It was an all night session, with 700Gb of data being copied around, but at 4AM I had a server and workstation running.

I am currently writing this on a 1.6Ghz workstation with 1Gb of RAM. It has Ubuntu 8.10 and a host of other applications. I will write about some of the challenges over the next few weeks.

Just let me say the the biggest issues, audio for Skype and Audacity are solved and printing CDs on the Cannon printer/scanner are solved. Virtualbox gives me access to the Philips Skype Phone via a Windows 2000 VM with the software for both installed.

More on the issues and lessons later

Enjoy!