Code to change from read-only file system to read/write file system?

[Nigel Henry]

On Friday 24 April 2009 07:59, Ric Moore wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 18:02 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> > With the old drive disconnected (both data, and power cables), try
> > booting up, and see what you get. I forget how many SATA drives you have
> > in your new machine, but if only one, it should boot into Jaunty. I
> > suppose it is possible that the harddrive with Jaunty on it, even though
> > new, has had a disastrous failure, which may explain the crash. P
>
> If he just plugged in the old drive without setting it to slave, and
> both were masters, wouldn't that account for a problem?

Hi Ric.

Well Steven resolved the problem with my suggestion above, and posted me back 
offlist.

His harddrive with Kubuntu Jaunty on it, is an SATA drive, and as far as I 
know, there is no distinction between master, and slave on those, as they are 
all on individual controllers. But the PATA controller is as we know capable 
of having 2 devices on each cable, and master, and slave enter the equation.

Now I assume that his optical drive is on that cable, and is set as master, 
and I suppose that if his old drive, which he put into the machine, just to 
transfer 250GB of data to the SATA drive, was also set as master, there would 
likely be problems. Saying that though, Steven was able to transfer the data 
off of that drive, before he had the bad crash.

Now I've never mixed optical drives, and harddrives on the same cable using a 
PATA controller, but I assume that the same master, slave relationship 
applies, whether you have 2 optical drives, 2 harddrives, or one optical, and 
one harddrive, for the sake of not confusing the PATA controller.

He did ask me, again offlist, about changing the old drive to slave, 
reconnecting it, and trying it again, as he'd like to clear all the data off 
of it, so that he can use it for storage. I havn't yet replied on that as his 
Jaunty install on the SATA drive is /dev/sda1, and I believe his Intrepid 
install on the old PATA drive is also /dev/sda1. How he was able to transfer 
the data from the old drive to the SATA one, when both are /dev/sda1, I don't 
know, but he did it. perhaps when he did that the BIOS correctly identified 
the SATA drive as sda, and the old PATA drive as sdb, then the crash 
happened, and everything went pearshaped.

I suppose it's worth changing the old drive to slave, then booting up, and 
hoping that The SATA drive is correctly detected as sda, and the old drive is 
detected as sdb, then he should be able to re-format the old drive, so as to 
able to use it for data storage.

I have many distros on my 3 machines, and have set up a simple script in 
~/.kde/autostart, which is named Distro.sh, to display an Xmessage as to 
which distro is running. See below.

<quote>
#!/bin/bash

xmessage "Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04"
</quote>

You need to make the script executable, but apart from that, each time you 
login you'll get an xmessage showing which distro you are booted into.

The main reason I mention the one liner above, is that when Steven had his 
crash, he was a bit unsure as to if he had installed Jaunty on his new 
machine, or whether it was Intrepid. If you do have problems remembering 
things, it's nice to have this little xmessage telling you which distro is 
running.

I have an Asus mobo with 4 SATA controllers, and 1 PATA controller. I have 2 
SATA harddrives, and one optical drive on the PATA controller. I've never 
tried mixing both SATA harddrives, and PATA harddrives on this machine, so 
have no experience of any problems that may arise from that.

Apologies if I seem to be rambling on, but as always i just to help where I 
can.

Nigel.