C# Snippets

Just discovered Virtual Box had seamless mode. Virtual PC has a lot to catch up! The latest version with seamless mode is still in beta… Here, I’m running Fedora 11 in virtual machine, sharing the same desktop as Windows 7 RC. Cool, isn’t it?

Some minor problems though. All the Linux applications, including the panels, appear as a window on Windows, so clicking on any Linux app will bring all Linux app to the foreground. Not too nice. Resizing windows doesn’t seem to work after a while of usage.

I wish Virtual PC can play well with Virtual Box. Launching IE 6 (Virtual Window), with Virtual Box running, froze the computer, requiring a hard reset. It could have given me a warning that I shouldn’t be running 2 VMs at the same time…

Again, life didn't go so smoothly. Before resorting to using VirtualBox to recreate the files in the boot partition, I chose the Install or Upgrade option of the Fedora DVD. I tried to do an upgrade on the existing partition, namely /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00. The installation failed with an exception thrown. Then I resorted to VirtualBox and doing everything in Part 2. Upon rebooting, all went well, GUI grub loaded, Fedora boot screen came out, and then comes the login screen. Waited. Nothing happened. Some files must have been corrupted by the failed upgrade.

Recover process

Boot into Fedora DVD. Choose the Install or Upgrade option. Upgrade the existing partition. The installation should proceed smoothly now. Fedora recovered!

Continuing from the previous post. Everything would have been up and running again if I had did exactly as said in the previous post. However, I did an extra step. As suggested in forums, to create a partition, I would first fdisk and then mkfs.ext3. So I went to type this instead. sda7 is the newly created partition. #fdisk /dev/sda n p 1 <enter> <enter> w #mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda7 #reboot Again the grub screen, with the kernel totally gone.

Recovery Process

Boot into Vista, install VirtualBox (VirtualPC didn't work. No USB support). All the steps below are done in VirtualBox. Create new virtual machine. Install Fedora 10. (Default installation) Boot into Fedora. swapoff -a, delete the swap partition and edit fstab. (this is to create a configuration that matches my Fedora installation on my hard disk before I deleted my boot partition) Insert thumb drive and capture it. Open Terminal. Switch to root (su). Copy everything in /boot into my thumb drive, which is mounted on /mnt/TOSHIBA Shut down Fedora. Exit out of VirtualBox. Shut down Vista. Boot into Fedora DVD. Go into Rescue Installed System. Select English, US keyboard, no network. To find which device is the thumb drive, type #blkid My system showed /dev/sdb1: LABEL="TOSHIBA" UUID=... Also, note down the UUID of the root partition, we will need it later. /dev/dm-0: UUID="<note down this long string>" TYPE="ext3" Mount the thumb drive as follows #mkdir /mnt/thumb #mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/thumb Mount the boot partition #mkdir /mnt/boot #mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/boot Copy everything from the thumb drive to the boot partition. Next is to edit grub.conf #nano /mnt/boot/grub/grub.conf Change the timeout=0 to timeout=5 After hiddenmenu add the following to create the Windows Vista boot option.

title Windows Vista
 rootnoverify (hd0,1)
 chainloader +1

For the line beginning with kernel /vmlinuz, replace the UUID in the root=UUID=<replace this what you note down just now> To save, Ctrl+O To exit, Ctrl+X #reboot Fedora recovered!

Being new to Linux, I made a big mistake in deleting the boot partition. The story goes like this. A hard disk supports at most 4 partitions. I had Windows Vista and Fedora 10 installed. My system has 2 partitions taken up by the system recovery image. Windows Vista's Disk Management reports the partitions as follows 6 partitions? Hmm, I thought it could have been that the recovery partitions were special and does not take up entries in the partition table. Then I wanted to free up one partition to make (partition table) space for Windows 7 Beta 1. So Linux swap partition shall go. As I had tried out Fedora 2 long time ago, I thought the 3rd partition was Linux swap and 4th the Linux root. Booted into Linux, swapoff and edited the /etc/fstab file to exclude the swap partition. Booted back to Vista, deleted the 3rd partition. Boom! The truth revealed... I have in fact only 4 partitions! The 2 Linux partitions were on the extended partition. Rebooted my computer. All is not well... At start-up To boot into Vista, I had to type rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1 boot After looking through a number of websites, it finally dawned on me that the default Fedora partitioning had changed. The 3rd partition is a boot partition and the 4th is an LVM partition, which contains both swap and root. (both are totally new to me) No boot partition means no Fedora kernel, and that means my Fedora will never boot! Oh no!

Recovery process

Boot from the Fedora DVD. Go into Rescue Installed System. Select English, US keyboard, no network. Next step is to re-create the boot partition. #fdisk /dev/sda n p 1 <enter> <enter> w #reboot Fedora recovered!