Lousy Lynx

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I have a couple of systems that run Ubuntu part-time.  Both dual-boot with
Vista because I put them in on Dell machines and had plenty of disk space.
To do this, I did a couple of odd things to the partition table.  I took
space away from Vista, and added a swap and Linux (sda6 and sda7). This
leaves
the partitions out of order, but makes it possible to talk to Dell tech
support and not have to mention their presence (there's a weird partition at
the end of the
drive whose purpose I don't know, and I did not want to fiddle with it.

I teach computer science in university, and I'm about to be humbled.
 Classes start tomorrow, and my laptop Ubuntu is hosed.  It decided
yesterday that
it no longer knew anything about its LAN or wireless cards.  I could not
figure out the config tools which seemed to need the MAC address (I know
what it
means, but I don't know how to find that number on a broken system where
'ifconfig' isn't seeing them).  This makes it hard to work with.

Fortunately, I can boot from floppy.  I expect the Vista system is okay,
because it was okay until I changed the Linux paritions' locations because I
want
to give a little space back to Vista.   But now grub is hosed, sort of.  The
good news is I have a portable 2TB drive with both SATA and USB, so I've
been
getting things to the laptop by "sneakernet", and it's pretty quick.  But
overall, the machine is useless at the moment.

I've booted from CD, restored a backup, and chrooted to my root partition
where things seem okay.  I've run grub-install
    grub-install --root-partition=/mnt/root /dev/sda
and my menu.lst looks okay.  Problem is that on reboot, I just get the grub
shell and I don't know how to use it.  If I could get to the menu, I'd
probably be
okay.

I'd even be workable for class tomorrow if I could just boot the vista
partition, but I'm not sure how to restore the MS MBR, and I don't think I
backed that up.

Final problem: neither the desktop nor the alternative 10.04.1 CD is willing
to install on my sda, doubtless because of the funny partition arrangement.
 The partition utility sees SDA, but disavows any knowledge of any
partitions on it.  My command-line tools work okay, and fdisk does report
that partitions are out of order,
but does not otherwise seem to mind.

I'm okay with this eventually, because I know I can install and older Ubuntu
on it (I did it once, somehow), and take the upgrade route (I had held off
until summer, but didn't get around to it until a couple of weeks ago, so I
know this can be done).  I think I have had 8.04 on it, and am sure I had
9.04 and 9.10.  I'm pretty sure I had to use alternate install, but it
worked.

Anybody with a quick idea or two? At the moment, I desperately need Vista
because it's got my Dreamweaver CS4 on it (which does not virtualize well).


HELP!

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
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