Knoppix Rescues Windows Again

Knoppix saved another Windows box for me. This weekend I trashed my laptop a little. I tried installing Ubuntu 7.10 to an old USB hard drive and wasn't paying attention to how the install skipped over the boot loader options. The next thing I know, Ubuntu's wrecked the master boot record (MBR) on my laptop's internal drive. Booting up gives me a painful-looking:

GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 2

My first attempt was to boot up an XP install CD and try to run FIXMBR. But since it's my company's work laptop, I don't know the local Administrator account's password so I can't even get into the recovery console at all. I was thinking of pulling together all the pieces to download a DOS or Windows 98 floppy image and boot from that to run FDISK /MBR, which supposedly will still work to boot Windows XP.

Then I had my first useful idea in all of this. Knoppix. I popped in an old Knoppix DVD and booted it up. I struggled for a bit with trying to find an XP MBR to dd onto my laptop hard drive, thinking "surely there's an archive of MBRs out there on the net". Then I stumbled across my final answer, ms-sys. Ms-sys can write any of the Microsoft MBR's to a hard drive. I ran "ms-sys -m /dev/sda" and rebooted. Windows XP came up fine.

I've since gone back and tried to make Ubuntu boot from that portable USB drive, but I can't get a machine to even get to the boot loader no matter how I fiddle with the partition table. Maybe I need to try a different drive. I'd love to have a full-blown Ubuntu install on a bootable USB drive, especially since Wifi support finally works so well.

Technocrati tags: knoppix fixing Windows MBR

Cool Bash tricks

http://unixjunkie.blogspot.com/2006/01/two-cool-bash-tricks.html

Those are cool, especially the socket trick.

Windows driver for Linux disks

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

This is only for ext2 (and 3?) filesystems, but that's still pretty
cool if you dual-boot or otherwise share physical disks between Linux
and Windows.

Title Your PuTTY's

Every day I end up with at least a half-dozen PuTTY sessions open to various unix and other POSIX-ish boxes. By default PuTTY titles each window with the hostname, but when I have multiple sessions to a single box, it's hard to keep them straight. I was happy to see that PuTTY handles the same title escape sequence as xterm, so you can programmatically change the window title from the host you're connected to.

Just set up an alias, function, shell script, .profile, or even your $PROMPT to echo the right sequence and you'll be able to title your windows, whether they're PuTTY sessions, xterms, Gnome terminals, or almost any other Linux terminal session package.

The sequence is: <esc>]0;<title><bel> where <esc> is the escape key, 0 is a zero, <bel> is control-G and <title> is the title you want to set.

Technocrati tags: putty