News items for tag laptop - Koos van den Hout

After fixing the server hardware I had some time due to the Christmas holidays to look at my laptop, a Dell. It's getting a bit aged (originally from January 2016) and especially the disk is getting slow. Due to the upgrade of SSD storage in the homeserver I still have two 240 gigabyte solid state drives. So I tried to migrate the laptop to one of those solid state drives. Which was interesting in a number of ways: there are two operating systems to migrate: Linux and Windows 10 and the harddisk is 500 gigabyte, so 240 gigabyte would need an amount of cleanup before all could be moved.

I thought the harddisk was 320 gigabyte, so the downgrade from 500 to 240 gigabyte was worse than I expected.

I did some reading on migrating Windows 10 to an SSD and found out I needed a cloning tool. Navigating between subscriptions and expensive versions I found Macrium Reflect which according to How to Copy Your Windows Installation to an SSD - PCMag should be able to do this.

I have an external USB to IDE/SATA interface which is great for this kind of work. So the SSD started in that slot.

First windows didn't want to delete the EFI partition from the GPT partition table. Since the original disk has an msdos partition table and the laptop doesn't have UEFI firmware I booted linux and created partitions as I wanted them with the right type.

After that I created the Linux swapspace and filesystem and copied all Linux data to the filesystem.

After that the Macrium Reflect tool would not copy Windows 10 partitions to existing partitions so I had to delete the two Windows 10 partitions. I have no idea why, but this laptop has a Dell partition, a windows partition named RECOVERY and a windows partition named OS. Deleting the two windows partitions on the target disk also made the linux swap and root filesystem disappear without any questions whether that was a good idea.

After that it was several hours to copy the windows filesystems. After that was done I used the windows disk and partition manager to resize the big partition to leave space for the linux installation.

I booted Linux again, created the swap partitions and root filesystem again and copied the data again. At least rsync with the right options is faster than Macrium Reflect.

After that I tried to install grub on the new disk with the right options and did the first test boot of the new disk. Open laptop underside, take out disk carrier, swap disk, put the disk carrier back in and close the laptop again.

No dice: grub stopped really early. I did more searching and found I needed to use grub-install /dev/sdb --skip-fs-probe --boot-directory=/mnt/newinstall/boot so time to remove the new drive again, revert to the old, rerun grub with those options, remove old drive, insert new drive and try again. This time the menu showed that I wanted but I got an error about accessing the disk by uuid.

After that I also tried windows on the SSD but that gave an error it needed the Windows recovery boot.

So again back to the old disk and looking at options for creating a recovery boot USB stick. The 'Create recovery disk' program was busy with disk i/o for about 15 minutes and reported the USB stick for recovery has to be at least 16 Gigabytes which I didn't have available.

At this point I gave up. This process took most of the afternoon and it started to feel frustrating.

The current numbers from the third battery in my Dell Latitude D630 laptop:

koos@machiavelli:~$ acpi -V
Battery 0: Discharging, 100%, 04:21:53 remaining
Battery 0: design capacity 7800 mAh, last full capacity 4544 mAh = 58%

A laptop battery is a part which wears out, so this is not unexpected after a few years.

Teken dat het echt slecht gaat met de accu van mijn Dell D630 laptop:

[   20.075680] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT0] (battery absent)
[   20.075762] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery absent)

Volgens acpi (en volgens de dell setup) zit er helemaal geen accu in. En dat terwijl ik nog een screenshot wilde maken van de gnome battery applet die beweerde dat de accu aan vervanging toe was.

After a bit of searching I managed to get my Dell Latitude D630 laptop to use the audio buttons in fvwm.

An interesting project at work: copying a given set of data to as big a number of USB storage devices as possible. So we buy 4 USB hubs, which got delivered today. Connecting them to the 4 different external USB ports on my laptop shows an interesting result:

 lsusb -t
Bus#  7
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x0000 Product 0x0000
  |-Dev#  35 Vendor 0x2001 Product 0xf103
  | `-Dev#  36 Vendor 0x0718 Product 0x0075
  |-Dev#  34 Vendor 0x2001 Product 0xf103
  |-Dev#  33 Vendor 0x2001 Product 0xf103
  `-Dev#  32 Vendor 0x2001 Product 0xf103
Bus#  6
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x0000 Product 0x0000
Bus#  5
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x0000 Product 0x0000
  `-Dev#  44 Vendor 0x0b97 Product 0x7761
    `-Dev#  45 Vendor 0x0b97 Product 0x7772
Bus#  4
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x0000 Product 0x0000
Bus#  3
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x0000 Product 0x0000
Bus#  2
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x0000 Product 0x0000
Bus#  1
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x0000 Product 0x0000
  `-Dev#  24 Vendor 0x413c Product 0x8140

Notice it? No? All the high-speed USB hubs (Vendor 0x2001 Product 0xf103) are behind the same root USB hub. Interesting USB congestion problems ahead probably.

My next step will be to discover all attached usb storage (probably thanking udev a lot in the process) and filling that storage with the wanted set of data.

Friday afternoon project: trying to make my Palm Tungsten E2 and my Ubuntu laptop talk IP to eachother. It took a bit of searching, but now it is working. It's one of those areas where one should not be afraid of a reboot, the incoming 'LAN access using PPP' kept being rejected until I rebooted the machine. Details added at The Dell Latitude D630 laptop and linux. The PalmOS webbrowser, Blazer, does show up with a weird user-agent: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-Zir4; Blazer/4.0) 16;320x320"

I made my own lolcat: Tender was sleeping on the couch near the laptop charger. I first tried to setup a picture but she was annoyed at my attempts to put the cable near her but 5 minutes later she went to sleep again. Recharging: 95% complete.

Happy new year! Our cable-tv signal dropped completely last evening of 2008 at 23:10. I guess some fireworks may have taken it out. So we watched the rest of the evenings TV using the dvb-t stick and the laptop. I called the cable-company this morning and reported the malfunction. Several neighbours I asked in the street are also without cable-tv signal.
Later in the afternoon the signal came back.

I received a new laptop from work and started writing down the experiences just like with the previous one: The Dell Latitude D630 laptop and linux. So far nothing shocking: I chose Ubuntu as linux distro.

I split the pages for the mobile phones I had working with the Dell Latitude C640 laptop into separate pages. Using the phone does not depend on the specific laptop, when the transport works (bluetooth) all systems will look the same, they just need the right software and the phone needs to cooperate. So, new pages:

• Nokia 6150 and Linux
• Nokia 6310i and Linux
• Nokia 6630 and Linux

Also a new laptop is on its way so I'll need to set up a new Linux on a laptop page soon.