Digitalquill

Following my recent re-install of my desktop machine I have followed the direction we are heading at work and setup Virtualbox with several environments each with a different OS.

The Desktop PC I am running is relatively old, Pentium 4 1.8Ghz with 3Gb of RAM.

I have the following running in Virtualbox

• Windows XP
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Windows 7 Beta (more of that later)
• Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop
• Ubuntu 8.10 Server
• Debian 4
• Debian 4 with ISPConfig Installed (again more of that later)
• Ubuntu Studio.

I have been trying to get Mac OSX working, which apparently is possible, but as yet I have had no luck.

I want to get Windows 2003 Server up and running as this will then replicate my windows server.

The main idea behind this is so that I have have environments that I can test things in before implementing on my live servers. I have been playing with ISPConfig on a virtual environment to see if there is any mileage with utilizing it. It looks promising.

The main advantage of virtualisation is that firstly you are in an enclosed, non-live environment thus no real harm can be done, and secondly if a mistake is made you can roll back to a saved point in time. It also allows me to save a copy of a basic Ubuntu or Debian setup and quickly create environments from it, meaning that testing things like ISPConfig can be done easily.

In addition to testing software, I have environments setup that are exactly the same as my live web servers, each with a copy of any websites deployed on them, allowing me to check any changes work on the most critical sites before releasing them to the live server.

I would like to be able to ‘mirror’ at least my Linux server to a virtual environment, probably on a day-by-day basis using the rsync’d archive backup.

Having managed to rescue the partition tables of my machine using ‘The Ultimate bot disk’ I could then boot the machine up into windows, however it was so slow all I could do was login, I could not browse drives or copy anything off.

I took the disk out and used a USB to IDE cable and plugged it into my Western Digital My Book World Nas drive which has a USB port on it. I then rebooted it and logged into the Linux operating system on the NAS drive.

I was pleased to see that it had mounted the disk and I could no only browse on command line the file system but open files.

I copied the whole disk onto the NAS Drive which took several hours! due o having over 300GB of data.

My plan now is to format the drive and start a fresh install. I will then create a Samba share of the copy on the NAS drive and I hope I will then be able to copy the required data back across the network to my desktop machine.

Rather a long process, although I would have got their quicker if I had been able to dedicate more time to it.

I was going to go for a dual Windows xp/Ubuntu 8 boot, however, I am going to try out VirtualBox and see if I can get some Linux environments working that way. If not I can always convert the XP install into a dual boot, but this risks tinkering with the dredded partitions again!!!

I left my main desktop PC with its broken partition table and thus nothing more than a box in the corner last night and went to bed – See my post last night about the strange happenings on my Desktop PC.

This evening I have been attacking the system from any angle I can desperately trying at least to recover the data and at best get the system back up and running without a full format.

I have used the Ultimate Bootup CD for Windows which has an array of useful applications to try. It is rather slow to boot up off the CD but once loaded it gives you access to virus checkers, disk clones, ghost, sector by sector copy software and much more.

I used the partition tools on the drive with were able to search the drive and locate the old partitions and re-create the partition tables from that information.

I also ran the Western Digital Disk Test utility which proved that there was nothing wrong with the drive its self.

I then booted back into windows which was deathly slow but after 10 minutes (yes that was 10 minutes) it finally booted up and gave me the log in screen, and allowed me to enter my password but then stuck on that screen for a further 10 minutes before giving the blue screen of death.

So although things started off promising, they now look just as bad as they did last night.

Time for bed again.

I must change the time setting on my server, these blog post times are all out!

This time not on a server fortunately, but my main pc. It started off with strange symptoms, could not get Internet, could not get network.

IPconfig showed no ip address and an ipconfig /renew gave the error “an error occurred while renewing interface Local Area Connection : the rpc service is unavailable”

Checking the RPC Services they are all automatic and started, however when entering properties of them both the options are grayed out so I can not restart them.

Thus I re-booted my machine only for it to halt on the Verifying DMI Pool data.

After some research I booted into recovery console and ran a fixboot and fixmbr. This totally goosed the drive, and gave an invalid partition table error.

Booting into Ubuntu live I could not see the disk at all, Knoppix was the same…

Too late tonight to sort it, but I fear that all is lost.