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Sunday, March 27, 2016

Sometimes, your best windows watch-dog, is a linux

I had an annoying morning with linux mint refusing to boot, 
in what at first appeared like a weird hanging at initial logo 
then, switching to the text messages (something you would expect
any self-respecting o/s to do, once an error is encountered),
it became apparent that mint was encountering difficulties 
mounting a partition. the data partition. 

Rebooting into mint recovery, and running fsck (thru the nice menu the recovery mode suggests)
things soon became clear: the data partition had a problem. 

Thinking about it, it soon became clear - During the weekend i found myself  booting using windows 10 (something i haven't done for a while, wishing to check something
about oracle xe on windows), and apparently, something in that usage end
left the partition with errors. 

Rebooting into windows, i expected the o/s to find the error and fix it by itself,
but windows 10 thought everything is ok(strengthening my dislike for this horrendous o/s). 

Only a manual chkdsk (using the nice properties/tools menu) has made windows realize that there was a problem with the partition. 

Having repaired it, I rebooted, and was happy to be back  with mint. But before I got back to work, I thought it might be wise to document this sordid adventure. 

So, what did I learn this morning ? 
1. linux is better than windows in identifying problems relating to an  NTFS partition both
   systems use in a dual-boot architecture.  
2. mint is not very good in communicating its problems at boot through the GUI interface. 
3. even a random usage of windows 10 may haunt you days later...

[update, 10/04/2016: I've been a little bothered by Mint's behavior and went back to find out why was it that I could not fix the partition's errors through Mint, turns out that ntfsfix is not linked by default to fsck.ntfs. Leaving fsck helpless, facing NTFS partitions. If you ran into a similar problem, this thread suggests a solution - making the necessary links - that worked for me]


Friday, March 4, 2016

installing android 4.4-r5 on virtual box and falling at grub?

I Tried installing android for pc 4.4-r5 on a virtual box virtual machine and was saddened by a weird phenomenon.  The installation seemed to go smooth, but at reboot, I was dropped to grub. 

Solution
When you are in the partitioning stage, create 2 (TWO) partitions:
a first, small one, for grub, 
a second, large one, for Android. 

Afterwards, everything will go smoothloy. 

useful links