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"Hidden partitions"
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 19 Feb '07

19 Feb '07

Hi Folks, I understand that many laptops have BIOS-admin and diagnostic programs stored in a "hidden partition" on the hard drive -- usually accessed by pressing a function key during the first stage of booting. Any suggestions about a) How to find out where this partition is (e.g. starting and ending cylinders) -- indeed to find out whether it is there in the first place? b) How to (e.g.) wipe that other OS off the drive and install Linux without affecting this hidden partition? With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Feb-07 Time: 09:47:49 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Compile errors
by Barry Samuels 18 Feb '07

18 Feb '07

I'm still fiddling with this new Asus P5W DH mainboard of mine. I've given up with trying to get the IDE DVD drive working and the people that sold me my current DVD drive last November, and the P5W mainboard, have offered to swap that drive for a SATA version so I shall try that. However - on to the reason for this post. I'd like to try and get the on-board Realtek 8187 wireless working so I downloaded the latest drivers from the Realtek site only to have the compile fail. So before I make a fool of myself by emailing Realtek could there be any other reason for the failure apart from faulty code? This is what I get: ieee80211_softmac.c:2168:78: error: macro "INIT_WORK" passed 3 arguments, but takes just 2 ieee80211_softmac.c: In function 'ieee80211_softmac_init': ieee80211_softmac.c:2168: error: 'INIT_WORK' undeclared (first use in this function) ieee80211_softmac.c:2168: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once ieee80211_softmac.c:2168: error: for each function it appears in.) ieee80211_softmac.c:2169:88: error: macro "INIT_WORK" passed 3 arguments, but takes just 2 ieee80211_softmac.c:2170:94: error: macro "INIT_WORK" passed 3 arguments, but takes just 2 ieee80211_softmac.c:2171:96: error: macro "INIT_WORK" passed 3 arguments, but takes just 2 ieee80211_softmac.c:2172:82: error: macro "INIT_WORK" passed 3 arguments, but takes just 2 ieee80211_softmac.c:2173:82: error: macro "INIT_WORK" passed 3 arguments, but takes just 2 I'm using gcc-4.1. The only 'c' I understand has tides. :-)) -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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HTML Mail
by Mark Ridley 17 Feb '07

17 Feb '07

I'm not trying to stir up an argument here, but why do people hate HTML mail so much? Most modern mail tools display HTML just fine, and the overhead needed to send a bulkier mail message is negligible. I'm one of these people that use multiple mail clients, depending on which box I'm using, and it really doesn't matter to me. Although I send mail mails plain text, it never bothers me when I receive HTML mail. Just curious as to how people feel about it. -Mark ----------------------------------------------------------- This message may contain confidential and/or privileged information. This information is intended to be read only by the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are on notice that any review, disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete or destroy any copy of this message.

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Re: Asus P5W DH Deluxe mainboard and IDE interfaces
by Barry Samuels 17 Feb '07

17 Feb '07

I've had to have a two day break from this thread because I decided to try my two hard drives on the JMicron interface and the DVD drive on the Intel interface. The mainboard manual says the JMicron interface supports up to 2 devices. The short version of the story is that I ended up with the file systems on both drives comprehensively trashed! Linux is normally very good at recovering from file system errors but it couldn't do anything with these. The long story: After swapping interfaces I booted the machine using a Knoppix v5.1 CD, because I'd need to change device names in a couple of files, but went into the BIOS first. The DVD registered as the first primary drive in the first main menu screen as expected but it seems very odd that once in the BIOS any devices connected to the JMicron interface are not listed anywhere. Drives are set as Master and Slave. They are shown, briefly for about 5 seconds, just before entering the BIOS and it was here that I noticed that only one hard drive was shown after the heading 'HDD:' but the name that followed was just a random collection of letters and numbers, the font was also broken up (characters had gaps in them), and that line of text was flashing. I left the BIOS and continued with the boot into Linux and tried mounting one of the partitions. On seeing the message that 'the filesystem has errors' I didn't go any further but closed down the system. I then swapped the cables back to their original positions and tried to boot but it hung a short way into the process. I decided to swap the primary drive and DVD drive back into my old machine and boot from the same Live CD to examine the hard drive. The contents were basically rubbish! I spent quite a lot of yesterday restoring from tape which, as there is a fair amount of data, was a rather slow business. The tape was up to date as far as early yesterday morning so I lost a couple of unimportant emails but that was it. So I'm not over impressed with the JMicron interface so far. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Re: [ALUG] Re: Asus P5W DH Deluxe mainboard and IDE interfaces
by Barry Samuels 16 Feb '07

16 Feb '07

On 16/02/07 10:15:17, Eur Ing Chris Green wrote: > On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 09:42:57AM +0000, Barry Samuels wrote: > > > > On 16/02/07 08:37:00, Eur Ing Chris Green wrote: > > BTW I took a look at the Asus 5W HD manual and there are a couple of > interesting little snippets:- > > Under the JMicron IDE interface description it says "This > connector does not support ATAPI devices", so you can't put CD > (or DVD) drives on it I guess. Yes I've seen that but it will boot and run from a Live CD on that interface and I have seen comments from other Linux users about trying to get CD/DVD drives working on that interface. So I'm not sure quite what it means. > Under the Intel IDE interface description it says "Install > devices on this connector (PRI_IDE) first, then install on the > JMicron IDE connector, ...". The Intel interface had the DVD drive on it and the two hard drives on the JMicron so that should satisfy that requirement. It would be useful if I could trace the problem to something that I had done. Then, at least, I would have a satisfactory explanation. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Samba / Machintosh issue
by Stuart Bailey 15 Feb '07

15 Feb '07

Hi , I have a customer with a small office network They are running debian on their server, and have a mixture of macs and windows workstations. The server is using samba to shared a number of network drives via SMB. the Windows machines can see and browse all of the workgroup, and all machines / shares within the workgroup. The Macs show nothing when browsing the network, but can mount the shares if the path is entered manually. Also, if I go to the Mac console, smbstatus, smbtree, smbclient and nmblookup all seem to produce the correct results. The macs are not listed in the workgroup. The Macs are running OSX 10.4.8. Is this just a Mac issue, or do I need to configure something special in Samba for this to work? Apparently, it did work before all the machines were switched off for Christmas. I've now exhausted my knowledge of Macs - any help, direction etc would be appreciated. Many thanks, Stuart. -- --------------------------------------- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Owner) Linux Specialist (0845) 6583563 http://www.linusoft.co.uk ----------------------------------------

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RE: [ALUG] Hello
by Tracy Dickerson 14 Feb '07

14 Feb '07

Sounds just grand Peter. I will look forward to the talks, should be very interesting and informative. I can see I might be more in tune with my 'puter before long which will be very nice. We do not really get on to be fair. lol Will be good to meet other people who use or have used Fedora because when I get in a muddle, my 'sysadmin' lives in Worcester! Looking forward very much to Monday. Tracy. -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of samwise Sent: 14 February 2007 16:07 To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] Hello > Is there any kind of agenda, or will this one be a meet and greet? Well, there has been one small meeting so far, before I started publicising the LUG more widely and the five members who attended that one expressed an interesting in having a half-hour or so interactive presentation by a member on whatever topic interested them - how to compile software, build your own kernel, run virtual machines, use an iPod, archive a CD collection etc. However, as there may be lots of new people (hopefully), I think we'll keep it fairly flexible again for this one and just get an idea of what everyone else wants to get out of our LUG too. So, I've said I'll bring along a laptop with some information about using a virtual server under Kubuntu, but we may not get into that. There are also a few other things we need to finalise, but it will be mostly meet & greet. > Although I have been using differing flavours of Red Hat and Fedora > over a fair few years, I would not say I have much experience with the > innards of them. I would like to learn more about using the command > prompt as I get lost very very easily. So if some of my questions > could get answered along the way I would be very happy indeed. No problem, Tracy! We have at least one other regular Fedora user and I've used a number of variants of it myself as well ... I'm sure you'll get some new things to try before the meet's over. :) Ooh ... I've just had an idea - maybe we should have a regular Agony Aunt slot in the meeting, for people to tell everyone else what they're stuck with! :) If we get a wiki up and running, I can see that coming in handy with that! Peter. _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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RE: [ALUG] Hello
by Tracy Dickerson 14 Feb '07

14 Feb '07

Hey Peter, I am sure no disappointment will occur. I hope that the interest is significant enough for the meetings to continue. Is there any kind of agenda, or will this one be a meet and greet? Although I have been using differing flavours of Red Hat and Fedora over a fair few years, I would not say I have much experience with the innards of them. I would like to learn more about using the command prompt as I get lost very very easily. So if some of my questions could get answered along the way I would be very happy indeed. T -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of samwise Sent: 13 February 2007 17:14 To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] Hello Hi, Tracy. I hope we won't disappoint! I think there's been quite a bit of interest so far, so I'm hoping we shouldn't struggle for numbers. Next week should be an interesting meet-up ... ! Peter. _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Hello
by Tracy Dickerson 13 Feb '07

13 Feb '07

Hello All, I am interested in the potential for a Ipswich LUG. I find it impossible to be able to make the Norwich meets, and am a silent member of the Malvern LUG mailing list where a friend is a member. They have very interesting chats and I hoping that the Ipswich meets will be just as interesting. Laters, Tracy Dickerson QA LudoLogic This electronic message contains information from Ludologic Ltd which may be privileged and confidential. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual(s) or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify us by telephone or email (to the number or address above) immediately.

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Asus P5W DH Deluxe mainboard and IDE interfaces
by Barry Samuels 13 Feb '07

13 Feb '07

I have recently changed my mainboard to an Asus P5W DH Deluxe which includes both SATA and IDE interfaces. There are 2 IDE connectors of which one is controlled by an Intel chip and the other by a JMicron chip. I have two IDE hard drives (hda and hdb) both on the same cable and connected to the Intel interface. I also have an IDE DVD Writer connected to the JMicron interface. When Linux (kernel 2.6.20) boots it does not recognise the DVD Writer although I can get Knoppix 5.1 to boot from the DVD drive if I append irqpoll at the boot prompt after which everything seems to work. If I append irqpoll at the normal Linux boot prompt I get 'lost interrupt' messages when the system is starting and it seems to hang. It also lists, in the logs, a device sda which does not exist. There is a SCSI card installed which drives a DAT tape drive but nothing else. There are no SATA devices connected. Is there a way around this JMicron problem (DVD not recognised) or do I have to wait for the JMicron drivers in the kernel to be improved? What is this spurious sda device? Kernel settings: # # ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support # CONFIG_IDE=y CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y # # Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers # CONFIG_ATA=y CONFIG_SATA_AHCI=y CONFIG_ATA_PIIX=y CONFIG_SATA_INTEL_COMBINED=y CONFIG_ATA_GENERIC=y CONFIG_PATA_JMICRON=y CONFIG_PATA_MPIIX=y Log extract: kernel: ahci 0000:02:00.0: version 2.0 kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:00.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 kernel: PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:02:00.0 to 64 kernel: ahci 0000:02:00.0: AHCI 0001.0000 32 slots 2 ports 3 Gbps 0x3 impl SATA mode kernel: ahci 0000:02:00.0: flags: 64bit ncq pm led clo pmp pio slum part kernel: ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8824100 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 18 kernel: ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8824180 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 18 kernel: scsi2 : ahci kernel: ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) kernel: scsi3 : ahci kernel: ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) kernel: ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: version 2.00ac7 kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.1[A] -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 kernel: ata: 0x1F0 IDE port busy kernel: ata: conflict with ide0 kernel: PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.1 to 64 kernel: ata3: DUMMY kernel: ata4: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xFFA8 irq 15 kernel: scsi4 : ata_piix kernel: scsi5 : ata_piix kernel: ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0x177 kernel: ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ P0 P2 P1 P3 ] kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[B] -> GSI 23 (level, low) -> IRQ 20 kernel: PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64 kernel: ata5: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xE400 ctl 0xE082 bmdma 0xD880 irq 20 kernel: ata6: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xE000 ctl 0xDC02 bmdma 0xD888 irq 20 kernel: scsi6 : ata_piix kernel: ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0xE407 kernel: scsi7 : ata_piix kernel: ata6.00: ATA-6, max UDMA/133, 640 sectors: LBA kernel: ata6.00: ata6: dev 0 multi count 1 kernel: ata6.00: Drive reports diagnostics failure. This may indicate a drive kernel: ata6.00: fault or invalid emulation. Contact drive vendor for information. kernel: ata6.00: configured for UDMA/133 kernel: scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA Config Disk RGL1 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:00.1[B] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 kernel: PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:02:00.1 to 64 kernel: ata7: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xAC00 ctl 0xA882 bmdma 0xA400 irq 16 kernel: ata8: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xA800 ctl 0xA482 bmdma 0xA408 irq 16 kernel: scsi8 : pata_jmicron kernel: ata7.00: ATAPI, max UDMA/33 kernel: ata7.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xef) kernel: ata7.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4) kernel: ata7.00: limiting speed to UDMA/25 kernel: ata7: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs kernel: ata7.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xef) kernel: ata7.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4) kernel: ata7.00: limiting speed to PIO0 kernel: ata7: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs kernel: ata7.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xef) kernel: ata7.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4) kernel: ata7.00: disabled kernel: scsi9 : pata_jmicron kernel: ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0xA807 kernel: serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1 kernel: serio: i8042 AUX port at 0x60,0x64 irq 12 kernel: mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice kernel: input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /class/input/input0 kernel: TCP cubic registered kernel: Starting balanced_irq kernel: Using IPI Shortcut mode kernel: Time: tsc clocksource has been installed. kernel: kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds kernel: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly. kernel: Freeing unused kernel memory: 188k freed kernel: NET: Registered protocol family 1 kernel: SCSI device sda: 640 512-byte hdwr sectors (0 MB) kernel: sda: Write Protect is off kernel: sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 kernel: SCSI device sda: write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA kernel: SCSI device sda: 640 512-byte hdwr sectors (0 MB) kernel: sda: Write Protect is off kernel: sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 kernel: SCSI device sda: write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA kernel: sda: unknown partition table kernel: sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda kernel: st: Version 20061107, fixed bufsize 32768, s/g segs 256 kernel: st 1:0:6:0: Attached scsi tape st0 kernel: st 1:0:6:0: st0: try direct i/o: yes (alignment 512 B) After reading a lot on the Internet and seeing other people with similar problems with JMicron and no solutions I'm not expecting much but there's no harm in asking. Suggestions will be very much appreciated. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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