Thursday, April 4, 2013

Holiday Mood and Booting and Rooting Problems


Holiday Mood and Booting and Rooting Problems
When one is on holiday mood one is more likely to make mistakes.
Today was one of those mornings.
We had a busy schedule throughout the week and also examination which were delayed due to our industrial action by almost 6 months (everybody was working hard and full time to get the system into new gear).
It was only yesterday afternoon I had a break.
Had a long evening  nap; missed my lunch too (but plenty of fluids going in due to heat wave and ?global warming) and had the dinner at midnight.
Switched on the computer after dinner.
Copied few images downloaded to an external laptop hard disk (removed since the battery was dead and I did not want to buy a new battery-not available in the local market freely and if I order one by mail order it will cost the price of a cheap tablet) and I am considering giving leave to all my computers doing my donkey work and buy a Kindle Fire (but I won’t be able to read any book since Sri-Lanka is the only airspace not available for Amazon due to wrong attitude of the people in IT business here and lack of political vision) and do some reading on the fly, in my twilight years and no more writing on Linux.
Then I woke up early, switched on the computer but could not boot to my hard disk.
Some bizarre Grub file is coming out instead of my desktop computer,
Put a live CD on the disk drive it wont boot.
Changed the boot menu several times and it won’t boot.
Now I was in my panic mood.
Considered reinstalling my favorite PCLinux Fullmonty.
Even that won’t boot.
More panic.
Then hit F12 and booted a live CD.
OK.
Another Live CD OK.
Hard disk boot up (by this time I had removed all hard disks from the boot menu except one) no boot menu.
Then pressed the fist boot option which was USB MODE.
Again coming to a bizarre GRUB file and then only I realized I had set the boot menu to boot from USB and it was booting from the laptop hard disk.
Presto!
My heart rate dipped and it went down to almost to cooling temperature (mind you morning is bit cold now but very dry) good enough for bypass surgery.
Mind you, I did not have my morning cup of coffee.
Removed the USB hard disk and changed the boot menu to my original configuration and desire and all is well now.
It took two hours and was a bit of entertainment for me due to holiday mood.
I love crisis with short notice.
All wells and ends well, was the outcome.
So my advice for young and old guys is if one is on holiday mood please switch off the computer/s for good and enjoy the sunshine and the freedom you have  earned deservedly.
Do not call the utility guy in panic he will charge you for the call.
I am gong for my morning coffee two hours late.
Without any notice power failure and could not put the kettle on and had to be satisfied with some ice tea.
The “Heladive Ice Tea” is making its appearance again; the current formula with an artificial flavour is not as good as when it was dispensed with the original flavour, especially the Peach Flavour.
I hope they get the formula for the flavour right with the flavour of light tea.
Strong tea leaves a little bitter taste and won’t go with the flavour added.
It is trial and error and customer feedback and one day we will have a very nice Ice Tea, much better than the Coca Cola.
Heladive has to work hard on it and consider increasing the price for Ice Tea with natural Flavour.
It looks that the artificial flavour spoils the taste of good tea flavour.