I’m writing this in the hopes that it eases the pain of others.  You see, it took an annoying amount of web searching to find a satisfying resolution to all my woes.  Let me explain…no, there isn’t enough time….let me sum up.  The controller, or possibly a motor, went bad on my desktop’s hard drive.  After spending a full day desperately trying to resuscitate it, I put in a new hard drive, but I didn’t have a Vista installation disc handy, so I installed Ubuntu Linux on it.  Now, I could have tried using Ubuntu on my main desktop, I guess, except for one thing.  Mitch Hedberg once said “A mini bar is a machine that makes everything expensive.”  As much as I have used and loved Linux, I must confess– it’s an OS that makes everything incompatible.  Case and point– it didn’t work with my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.  Both of them have a power-saving feature where they shut off until an I/O event, at which point they re-partner.  The Bluetooth system on Ubuntu wasn’t up to the task.  Besides that, I can’t run Adobe CS4 on Linux.

Anyway, I had to re-order the system recovery discs from Acer.  I popped them in and let them get to work, only to fail with the well-documented “Error: 0xd0000017″.  Of course, everyone knows what this hex number means, so I’ll just get on with it.  Actually, I’m lying.  Nobody knows.  I sure didn’t.

Error 0xd0000017 is basically an Acer recovery CD complaint that means “Waaaah!  This drive has stuff on it!  I can’t handle this!”  You very likely will experience this problem if you use these discs to replace a Linux install.  So, what to do?  Well, grab a handy Ubuntu CD or, in my case, USB stick.  You need to do this so that your root file system is not your hard drive.  Then, from there, you’re free to blow away your hard drive’s contents.  I only have the one drive, so it’s easy to find — /dev/sda.  A full wipe was thus easy to do with the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Note that that’s /dev/sda and not /dev/sda1.  Blow everything away, including the partition information.  After that, the Acer disks will run just fine.

I should note that this is a fairly slow process, however.  It took nearly 24 hours to clean out a 1.5 TB disc.  If anyone has advice on how that can go faster, please feel free to mention it in the comments.

I am not entirely sure why I haven’t posted here sooner.  I guess I felt it was best to get some time at the job under my belt before talking about it too much or I’d jinx it.  Either that or it’s my short attention span.  Either way, while a build grinds out, it’s time for an update.

I am alive and well and living on Ganymede.  Not really.  I’ve moved to San Jose.  Pretty much the week I arrived here, I’d gotten the matter of my unemployment handled.  I now work for Hewlett-Packard in their emerging technologies group.  I’m not really at liberty to talk about my project (even though it was leaked), but I can say I’m working on some new products for the company and I get to spend a lot of time working with a lot of open source material.  I think Dr. Boykin might be pleased.

Of course, I’m still living in a small space and don’t have my electronics equipment with me, so there hasn’t been much fun hardware hacking on that front.  On the software side, I’ll mention a follow-up to my EeePC.  I blew away the Asus-supplied Linux distro (known as Xandros) and replaced it with Easy Peasy.  I have to say that, while I haven’t used Easy Peasy heavily yet, it strikes me as not only as superior to Xandros on a netbook but possibly as one of the most attractive Linux distros I’ve ever seen.  Better still, of course, is that installing it involves removing the copy-on-write filesystem scheme used on Xandros, so I now suddenly have an attractive desktop environment, a full suite of development tools, and plenty of free space on the SSD to spare.  Developing from an SD card isn’t horrible, but it can get really slow.

One of the fun things I get to do at work is to muck around with extensions to an emulator.  If I can find a way to write about that on here without accidentally getting myself in trouble, I’ll make a future article of it.