Ubuntu For Free

What a disappointment. I’ve previously written about experiencing the Blank Screen Bug in Gutsy with the Release Candidate CD. Today, I was forced to experience that the problem is still there on the official release. I used Adept Manager to update 16 packages it noticed that were behind. After the update, it finally figured out that I was due for the distribution upgrade. It started the process and crashed. I rebooted and it informed me of 1304 updates. I started that process, it crashed, and failed to boot again.

I used the ISO for the Kubuntu 7.10 official release and tried to install. The first try, GRUB failed to point to the correct hard drive. The second time, it still used the wrong drive, but I edited the GRUB configuration and it successfully booted.

 The strangest thing, was even after I installed and booted up, the Adept Manager informed me of a couple of updates, and I updated those, and then it prompted me for a distribution upgrade… again. This time, I think I chose correctly when I opted to decline the upgrade.

Having previously configured my laptop for dual boot, I was satisfied with the way things were running. My wife would use XP. We’d enabled GRUB to save the default using the Start Up Manager, so we could hibernate in order to switch users and operating systems.

All was fine until Windows said “ENOUGH!” and bit the dust. I started out by getting the ominous sounding “Error 13 : Invalid or unsupported executable format” from GRUB. I wasn’t able to mount the partition in Kubuntu so I’m unable to retrieve any files from it.

I’ve tried using the Windows disk to boot to the recovery console. From that, I used fixmbr and it still didnt work. I used the great program Super GRUB disk to restore GRUB. Unfortunately, Windows still did not boot. What finally fixed it, was using FIXBOOT from the recovery console in Windows XP.

What an ordeal.