[Cialug] Dying commputer question

[murraymckee at wellsfargo.com]

I have a new CPU and I believe the ram is new to, but I don't remember
off the top of my head.  I'll try the memtest86 when I get home tonight.

I started memtest86 last night and ran it for about 25 minutes through
one complete cycle, and no errors were reported.  I'm assuming that even
though the test restarted, any error found would not be erased from the
screen.  I meant to leave it running overnight, but forgot to restart it
after I got done exploring Ubuntu.  BTW, the ram is new with the mother
board and CPU.

I was surprised to hear the existing hard drive being accessed while
Ubuntu booted off the CD.  Should I be worried about what it being read
or written to my C: drive?

I did boot the LIVE CD.  I was going to back some of my data up to a DVD
with K3b, but I couldn't access the windows C: drive.

Using both Media / Dolfin and Konqueror tried to access my C: drive
labeled 200G.  Both failed with
"hal-storage-fixed-mount-all-options-refused uid 999".  I have no idea
what this means, other than it obviously didn't work.  There was another
'drive' called 'remote share (unionfs)' which I took to be the CD, but
eventually I found a way to look at some of the CD, so now I'm thinking
this is something else, but I have no idea what.  There was no disk in
the floppy drive and no memory cards attached to USB.  Again with both
pieces of software I received the same error "permissions denied".  I
did find where I could right click on the drives and then go to
'actions' and then 'mount'.  Actually there were two 'mount' commands in
the menu off of 'actions' and I tried them both.  In all cases I
received the same errors as above.

Any clue what magic wand waving, or maybe critical command issuing,
needs to be done to mount the C: drive and access it?  I opened up a
command line and typed in 'mount /mnt /hda' but when I hit enter the
window disappeared and it didn't change the error returned as mentioned
above.

I created a new open office word document.  I was again quite surprised
to hear lots of C: drive accesses while the word processing software
opened.  But I couldn't save anything on my C: drive or see any
documents already on my C: drive.  Again, should I be worried about what
is being read or written to my C: drive?

I looked for SpinRite on the way home but couldn't find it for sale.  I
discovered this morning that it can only be down loaded and I don't have
a working windows machine to create the bootable version on.  Yeah, in
hind sight I should have done that before my machine crashed.  (My
machine here at work is locked down so I can't load any software on it.)

Thanks,

Murray McKee 
Operating Systems Engineer
WFFIS - Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems 
800 Walnut Street
MAC F4030-037
Des Moines, IA 50309-3605
WORK (515)557-6127 Cell (515) 890-9660  FAX (515) 557-6046
MurrayMcKee at WellsFargo.com 
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