To Technical

While watching the recently released movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka in his vast wisdom had some valuable advice to offer.

He becomes somewhat annoyed with the children, who keep reminding him how much more they know than any of the others. When they begin to tell him a technical reason that something cannot be done or that it's not scientifically possible, his response is simple yet profound. He simply tells them to stop mumbling, that he can't understand a word they are saying.

After seeing this a couple of times, a revelation comes to me. He's making an important point. Don't question. Don't hesitate. Don't let the illogical hold you back. Follow your heart. Find a way to make it happen. Even if you have to import Oompa Loompas from Oompa Loompa Land, make your dream a reality, whether in a chocolate factory or elsewhere.

Partitions

I had used the standard DOS fdisk to partition my harddrive. It's a meager drive at only 80 gig, but serves its purpose, that being, partitioned into many small partitions (most about 5 gig) so that I can install and check out some of the different Linux distributions that are available (I'm still looking for that perfect distro).

I'm guessing that I was tired/rushed/careless (maybe all three) or perhaps the installer decided it could do a better job than myself, but while installing Ubuntu, my partition structure was wiped out. No big loss, this is primarily a test machine anyhow, no serious data loss, but once finished looking at Ubuntu, I did need to recreate the partitions. I'm thinking, no problem, I'll just boot up my trusty Knoppix CD and use QParted (which is related to or the same at QTParted) which in theory would let me resize the existing and create new partitions.

No luck, the drive seemed to be getting locked, saying it was mounted although it wasn't, and other odd things. Keep in mind this is probably due to my not knowing exactly what I was doing (this was my first outing with QParted). I decided to wipe out all of the partitions and completely start from scratch, still having difficulty deleting the partitions with QParted. That's when I came across a project on sourceforge.net called Ultimate Boot CD that is bootable CD loaded with tools for setting up and manipulating your motherboard, processor, disks, partitions, and a variety of other things.

Using one of the tools on this CD, within the F3 option from the main menu (I don't remember the tools name), I was able to erase all of the partition information on the harddrive. Then I rebooted back into Knoppix and was able to recreate my partition structure using QParted. Exactly what my problem was before, I'm still not positive, but the steps/tools above got me back into a happy place again.