Hard disks are not forever

Just had a 2-3 year old SATA drive fail on me. If you're reading this, go and take backups of critical data. Do it. Now.

This is the cnc-mill controller machine so hopefully no critical data was lost. Some notes on the EMC2 install process, just in case I need to do it all over again sometime soon...

  • Install WinXP on a 50 Gb NTFS partition
  • Installed Ubuntu 6.06LTS from CD. Manual partition, 50 Gb for root file system, 2 Gb for swap.
  • Ubuntu update manager suggests 301 updates (278M) to install. I'm in Finland, but strangely my sources.list points me to au.something servers. Reboot.
  • Install EMC2 using emc2-install.sh. Reboot.
  • 'latency-test' shows reasonable jitter values - good.
  • Configure X to enable 1280x1024 resolution: 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg'. Answer lots of techy-questions, remember to add the correct screen resolution and the correct keyboard (pc102). I wasn't able to log in the first time I tried this because I had chosen an incorrect keyboard type/layout.