Re: [ubuntu-uk] Team Leadership Election Process

[Phill Whiteside]

Hiyas,

If you guys and gals capture Alan Bell as your team leader, you have made a
fantastic catch. Across all the teams I see him assist on he is the epitome
of what ubuntu means. He is caring, thoughtful, considerate and
knowledgeable. I know that across the teams we are both involved in that
they are glad of his input into them and he is greatly appreciated by them.
The title means nothing, Alan is not here for 'little badges', he is here to
help the community. Do not lose this chance. I know for a fact it will not
stop his work on the other teams, just a bit more work for him :)

Regards,

Phill.

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Matthew Daubney  wrote:

> Just to make things more interesting it's been pointed out that there is
> some confusion as to whether or not we have a team lead or a Point of
> Contact. Having dug through the history a bit, back in the early days of UUK
> we had a Team Leader, but just before Popey took the reigns this was turned
> into the role of a Point of Contact, however reading though the IRC
> conversation it wasn't actually clear if the role of Team Leader was being
> replaced or appended too.
>
> Based on this there has been some discussion as to what we should now do.
> As far as I can tell there are 3 ways we can proceed.
>
> 1. Keep the current uncertainty for now and decide what to do when Alan
> Bell decides to step down
> 2. Decide which role we want to put Alan Bell in now
> 3. Decide what role we want and change the role at the end of Alan Bells
> tenure
>
> Personally I'd go with item 2, as it will lead to less uncertainty and make
> the role mean something now.
>
> I've started a list of pro's and con's of various ways of defining the
> role, if people want to have a read thorugh this and add/amend to it that
> would be aces. http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/WhatTypeOfLeadership
>
> If we can start the discussion now, then I would recommend we put all of
> this to a vote at the next meeting.
>
> I know politics is boring but we need to do this really.
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
> -Matt Daubney
>
> (and if I have to do this again I promise there will be Ninja's, Pirates
> and maybe some mild peril!)
>
> --
> ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
>
>


-- 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/phillw
-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Avi]

Barry Drake wrote:
> Hitachi boot disk with a diagnostic/repair tool told be that the boot
> sector had an irrecoverable mechanical error.  

What, exactly, did it say? Did a google of the phrase turn anything up?

> This entire saga doesn't make any sense at all to me.  Any thoughts?  

Can you boot the machine with the disk plugged in? If so, is anything
pertinent logged (/var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages, dmesg)?

Have you tried switching between AHCI and non-AHCI mode? Many drives
have broken AHCI implementations where specifically not using it makes
things better. Sometimes vice-versa is true.

If Windows is fine with it, I'd not find it easy to blame anything
below the firmware - cables, controllers etc.

-- 
Avi

-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] Team Leadership Election Process

[Matthew Daubney]

Just to make things more interesting it's been pointed out that there is
some confusion as to whether or not we have a team lead or a Point of
Contact. Having dug through the history a bit, back in the early days of UUK
we had a Team Leader, but just before Popey took the reigns this was turned
into the role of a Point of Contact, however reading though the IRC
conversation it wasn't actually clear if the role of Team Leader was being
replaced or appended too.

Based on this there has been some discussion as to what we should now do. As
far as I can tell there are 3 ways we can proceed.

1. Keep the current uncertainty for now and decide what to do when Alan Bell
decides to step down
2. Decide which role we want to put Alan Bell in now
3. Decide what role we want and change the role at the end of Alan Bells
tenure

Personally I'd go with item 2, as it will lead to less uncertainty and make
the role mean something now.

I've started a list of pro's and con's of various ways of defining the role,
if people want to have a read thorugh this and add/amend to it that would be
aces. http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/WhatTypeOfLeadership

If we can start the discussion now, then I would recommend we put all of
this to a vote at the next meeting.

I know politics is boring but we need to do this really.

Thanks for reading.

-Matt Daubney

(and if I have to do this again I promise there will be Ninja's, Pirates and
maybe some mild peril!)
-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Rob Beard]

On 18/03/11 18:37, Barry Drake wrote:

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 17:42 +, Rob Beard wrote:

You might find it could be an SATA cable.  Chances are you're not going
to find a big IDE drive easily now as everything is going down the route
of SATA.


First thing I did was try a new SATA cable.  I found a 320 GiB IDE drive
at Amazon quite cheaply, so I'm getting that.  I'm very reluctant to
re-flash the BIOS as a) it may not work (the updates give reasons and
none of them are SATA-related).  And b), if it goes wrong, there's no
way out if you can't boot!


The majority of motherboards have BIOS recovery these days, most IIRC 
use floppies to boot and flash a BIOS and others can use USB sticks.


As long as you're careful (make sure the power doesn't go off, flash the 
correct BIOS) then it's unlikely anything could go wrong.





You may however find that either a PCI (or PCI Express) SATA controller
or an IDE to SATA convertor may also do the job (it allows you to use an
SATA drive on an IDE connection)...


I hadn't thought about a PCI SATA adaptor.  That might have been an easy
answer.  The SATA/IDE adaptor would have been OK if I had two IDE slots.
SATA adaptors can't do master/slave drives, so I would have lost the DVD
drive.  I guess the new PCI drive will keep us going for the rest of the
computer's life.



Yeah it is kind of annoying that motherboards only have one IDE 
connector (or in some cases none at all).


Rob

--
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Barry Drake]

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 17:42 +, Rob Beard wrote:
> You might find it could be an SATA cable.  Chances are you're not going 
> to find a big IDE drive easily now as everything is going down the route 
> of SATA.

First thing I did was try a new SATA cable.  I found a 320 GiB IDE drive
at Amazon quite cheaply, so I'm getting that.  I'm very reluctant to
re-flash the BIOS as a) it may not work (the updates give reasons and
none of them are SATA-related).  And b), if it goes wrong, there's no
way out if you can't boot!

> You may however find that either a PCI (or PCI Express) SATA controller 
> or an IDE to SATA convertor may also do the job (it allows you to use an 
> SATA drive on an IDE connection)...

I hadn't thought about a PCI SATA adaptor.  That might have been an easy
answer.  The SATA/IDE adaptor would have been OK if I had two IDE slots.
SATA adaptors can't do master/slave drives, so I would have lost the DVD
drive.  I guess the new PCI drive will keep us going for the rest of the
computer's life.

Regards,Barry.
-- 
Barry Drake is a member of the the Ubuntu Advertising team.
http://ubuntuadverts.org/


-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Rob Beard]

On 18/03/11 17:03, Barry Drake wrote:

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 12:40 +, Matthew Daubney wrote:


I'd check if there's an update for the BIOS, I've seen various
drives/chipset configurations have weird issues over time :)


Thanks.  There is an update.  But rather than risk frying my wife's
motherboard, I've taken the easy way out for now and popped an IDE drive
in to do backups.  It's barely big enough, so I'll probably look out for
a bigger IDE drive and be done with it.

Regards,Barry.



You might find it could be an SATA cable.  Chances are you're not going 
to find a big IDE drive easily now as everything is going down the route 
of SATA.


You may however find that either a PCI (or PCI Express) SATA controller 
or an IDE to SATA convertor may also do the job (it allows you to use an 
SATA drive on an IDE connection)...


http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200853

Rob

--
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[bodsda]

I'd definitely recommend a bios update, and also check for any controller 
firmware updates. 

Bodsda
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-Original Message-
From: Barry Drake 
Sender: ubuntu-uk-boun...@lists.ubuntu.com
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:03:42 
To: UK Ubuntu Talk
Reply-To: bdr...@crosswire.org, UK Ubuntu Talk 
Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 12:40 +, Matthew Daubney wrote:

> I'd check if there's an update for the BIOS, I've seen various
> drives/chipset configurations have weird issues over time :)

Thanks.  There is an update.  But rather than risk frying my wife's
motherboard, I've taken the easy way out for now and popped an IDE drive
in to do backups.  It's barely big enough, so I'll probably look out for
a bigger IDE drive and be done with it.

Regards,Barry.

-- 
Barry Drake is a member of the the Ubuntu Advertising team.
http://ubuntuadverts.org/


-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Barry Drake]

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 12:40 +, Matthew Daubney wrote:

> I'd check if there's an update for the BIOS, I've seen various
> drives/chipset configurations have weird issues over time :)

Thanks.  There is an update.  But rather than risk frying my wife's
motherboard, I've taken the easy way out for now and popped an IDE drive
in to do backups.  It's barely big enough, so I'll probably look out for
a bigger IDE drive and be done with it.

Regards,Barry.

-- 
Barry Drake is a member of the the Ubuntu Advertising team.
http://ubuntuadverts.org/


-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Matthew Daubney]

On 18 March 2011 12:20, Barry Drake  wrote:

> Hi there ..
>
> I'm really scratching my head over this one.  My wife's computer has a
> ALiveNF6P-VSTA motherboard.  This has one IDE connector and four SATA
> ports.  It was running Windows 2000 on a SATA drive, so I installed a
> second SATA drive (250 GiB) and put Ubuntu 10.04 on it.  I also
> installed a 160 GiB IDE drive for backups and all was fine.
>
> Last week, the IDE drive gave a SMART report that it was getting flaky
> so I replaced it with a 500 GiB Hitachi SATA drive.  Problems!  Could
> not copy more than 167.9 MB of data (by any means)  After that, the
> partition (ext4) became read only until I rebooted!  I tried
> re-partitioning and re-formatting and the drive appeared to die.  A
> Hitachi boot disk with a diagnostic/repair tool told be that the boot
> sector had an irrecoverable mechanical error.
>
> As a last resort, I popped the drive into my computer, and it
> re-formatted perfectly and showed no SMART errors.  I tried a 160 GiB WD
> drive in my wife's computer.  EXACTLY the same problem occurs.  I've now
> re-formatted it to NTFS and tried booting into the Windows 2000 disk.
> There is no problem copying files to the WD disk from Windows. But the
> problem is identical from Ubuntu.
>
> I've tried swapping the disks into different SATA slots and I've tried
> various things in the BIOS.  The only clue here is that the Mobo manual
> tells me: "LBA/Large Mode - Use this item to select the LBA/Large mode
> for a hard disk > 512 MB under DOS and Windows; for Netware and UNIX
> user, select [Disabled] to disable the LBA/Large mode."
>
> I've tried this on the WD drive and it makes no difference.  I tried it
> on the Ubuntu drive, but it causes Grub failure and brings up the Grub
> rescue prompt.  I could re-install with the LBA/Large mode turned off,
> but it's going to be hard for me to do a backup first   I think I'd
> have to re-install an IDE drive to do it.
>
> This entire saga doesn't make any sense at all to me.  Any thoughts?  I
> have no problem at all with either of the above SATA drives in my own
> computer which also has three SATA drives installed - and the LBA/Large
> mode is set to 'auto' on that one.
>
> Kind regards,   Barry.
>
>
I'd check if there's an update for the BIOS, I've seen various
drives/chipset configurations have weird issues over time :)

-Matt Daubney
-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

[ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Barry Drake]

Hi there ..

I'm really scratching my head over this one.  My wife's computer has a
ALiveNF6P-VSTA motherboard.  This has one IDE connector and four SATA
ports.  It was running Windows 2000 on a SATA drive, so I installed a
second SATA drive (250 GiB) and put Ubuntu 10.04 on it.  I also
installed a 160 GiB IDE drive for backups and all was fine.

Last week, the IDE drive gave a SMART report that it was getting flaky
so I replaced it with a 500 GiB Hitachi SATA drive.  Problems!  Could
not copy more than 167.9 MB of data (by any means)  After that, the
partition (ext4) became read only until I rebooted!  I tried
re-partitioning and re-formatting and the drive appeared to die.  A
Hitachi boot disk with a diagnostic/repair tool told be that the boot
sector had an irrecoverable mechanical error.

As a last resort, I popped the drive into my computer, and it
re-formatted perfectly and showed no SMART errors.  I tried a 160 GiB WD
drive in my wife's computer.  EXACTLY the same problem occurs.  I've now
re-formatted it to NTFS and tried booting into the Windows 2000 disk.
There is no problem copying files to the WD disk from Windows. But the
problem is identical from Ubuntu.

I've tried swapping the disks into different SATA slots and I've tried
various things in the BIOS.  The only clue here is that the Mobo manual
tells me: "LBA/Large Mode - Use this item to select the LBA/Large mode
for a hard disk > 512 MB under DOS and Windows; for Netware and UNIX
user, select [Disabled] to disable the LBA/Large mode."

I've tried this on the WD drive and it makes no difference.  I tried it
on the Ubuntu drive, but it causes Grub failure and brings up the Grub
rescue prompt.  I could re-install with the LBA/Large mode turned off,
but it's going to be hard for me to do a backup first   I think I'd
have to re-install an IDE drive to do it.

This entire saga doesn't make any sense at all to me.  Any thoughts?  I
have no problem at all with either of the above SATA drives in my own
computer which also has three SATA drives installed - and the LBA/Large
mode is set to 'auto' on that one.

Kind regards,   Barry.


-- 
Barry Drake is a member of the the Ubuntu Advertising team.
http://ubuntuadverts.org/


-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] Removing Windows dual boot

[Gordon Burgess-Parker]

On 18/03/11 08:41, bod...@googlemail.com wrote:

That sort of thing is character building :)



But as is different from Windows, pretty quick and painless..:-)

--
My Alternative Computing Blog 
-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] Removing Windows dual boot

[bodsda]

That sort of thing is character building :)

Bodsda
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-Original Message-
From: Gordon Burgess-Parker 
Sender: ubuntu-uk-boun...@lists.ubuntu.com
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 07:59:40 
To: UK Ubuntu Talk
Reply-To: UK Ubuntu Talk 
Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] Removing Windows dual boot

-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] Removing Windows dual boot

[Neil Greenwood]

On 18 March 2011 00:08, Rob Beard  wrote:
> On 17/03/11 21:31, Neil Greenwood wrote:
>
>> If you really want to convert, you have to delete the extended
>> partition and create a new primary partition.
>>
>> Otherwise, if there's room, you could reformat the ex-Windows
>> partition and copy the Ubuntu partition into it, then delete the old
>> Ubuntu partition and resize to make use of all the disk.
>>
>
> Not sure if it would work (i.e. I've not tried it myself) but I wonder if it
> would be possible to use GParted (maybe from an Ubuntu Desktop CD) to copy
> the contents of the logical partition to a primary partition?

Can you copy partitions in GParted? I've not tried it, or I tried it
many years ago when it didn't support NTFS 5 properly.

> AFAIK an extended partition is pretty much fixed (that is you can't move it
> along the disk, so if it's say half way along the disk you can't move it
> down to the start of the disk) so copying the data into a primary partition
> might be a good idea.

For future reference, you can move/resize an extended partition. It
should act pretty much like any other primary partition in that
respect.

If you're using a GUI tool like GParted, you have to make sure you
select the right bit to change it successfully. IIRC, it's easier to
select it in the list of partitions rather than the graphical view at
the top of the window.

> If you to attempt this though I'd suggest at least making a backup of your
> home directory (just in case).

Always good advice before playing with a partition editor! :-)


Cofion/Regards,
Neil.

-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/

Re: [ubuntu-uk] Removing Windows dual boot

[Gordon Burgess-Parker]

On 17/03/11 13:21, Gordon Burgess-Parker wrote:
I have a dual-boot machine - Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. I'm looking 
to remove the Windows part but unfortunately the Ubuntun install is on 
an extended partition. Is there any way to convert that extended 
partition to the active partition, or do I have to reformat and 
re-install?



Thnks for the responses - I mucked about a bit with GParted and got an 
unbootable system! (Dand Win 7!) So I just re-installed - I'd already 
backed up home :-)


--
My Alternative Computing Blog 
-- 
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/