My Adventures With Open-Source

English Open Chat
1

I must be a glutton for punishment… >:)

But I am sticking with Opensuse 11.1 in either the Gnome or KDE version. Despite my troubles as of late (which have proven to be a nearly completely corrupted hard-drive and NOT the Opensuse OS itself) I am coming back for more.

At least as soon as the new hard-drive comes by mail early next week. I think I am going to keep this thread open to post my growth with Opensuse and keep score of my wins and losses with the system.

I could go back to Windows. And maybe in the future I would dual-boot again but I don’t WANT to solely rely on Microsoft. I don’t hate them, I certainly don’t see them as the Global bullies that they sometimes go out of their way to show themselves to be. I do try to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I do at times, miss the “plug-and-play” ease of use of M$ Windows.

However, that’s boring and as the opening line suggests, I am a glutton for punishment. I think I will be having some fun for quite some time with this whole “open-source” concept.

Now, on to business, here is the hard-drive that I am going to install on my HP Pavillion 754n Desktop computer…

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB Hard Drive

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 desktop hard drive features innovative perpendicular recording technology and is the first drive on the market to provide capacities up to 750 GB. Barracuda 7200.10 hard drives deliver superb performance, efficiency, speed and durability for all your application needs.

The Seagate Advantage

High-capacity Barracuda® 7200 disc drives, from the world’s premier provider of high-capacity storage, provide our customers years of reliable service and high performance. Using advanced manufacturing techniques and extensive design experience, Seagate® engineers have built the world’s only ninth-generation 7200-RPM desktop disc drive.

**This Drive Holds **

  • 40 two-hour DVD-quality movies or
  • 160 hours of VHS-quality video or
  • 110 days of around-the-clock MP3 audio or
  • 40,000 vivid digital photos or
  • 228 action-packed games!

**Specifications **

Capacity (GB): 160

Interface: Ultra ATA-100

Spindle Speed (RPM): 7200

Buffer Memory: 8MB

Average Latency (msec): 4.16

Temperature, Operating (°C): 0 to 60

Temperature, Nonoperating (°C): -40 to 70

Shock, Operating: 2 msec (Gs): 63

Shock, Nonoperating: 2 msec (Gs): 350

Acoustics Idle (bels—sound power): 2.8

Acoustics Seek (bels—sound power): 3.0

Type: OEM

Dimensions: .78" x 4" x 5.78"

**Features **

Perpendicular recording technology for maximum drive capacity and reliability
8-MB cache buffer
Ultra-fast performance
Superb reliability
Whisper-quiet operation
Enhanced G-Force Protection against handling damage
Clean Sweep calibration and Directed Offline scan diagnostics
RoHS (restriction of hazardous substances) compliant
5-year warranty

2

I installed a 160 GB Seagate Barracuda on my mother’s old PC (Dell Inspiron 2100) over last Xmas. It was also a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB drive.

One thing about the Seagate Barracuda’s, and that is that there is a warning out from Seagate about a problem with selective groups of these drives, where I believe the drives need an update to their firmware, to avoid serious data loss. I checked, and the warning did not affect the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB Hard Drive.

The thread, where I documented my research/thoughts on how to proceed wrt my mother’s PC update with her new Seagate is here:
Looking for new hard drive advice - openSUSE Forums

The way in which you proceed is to a large extent driven by what your ultimate partitioning goals are, and it is entirely possible that the method I adopted is not applicable to what you have in mind.

3

Thank you very kindly for the link good sir! (tips hat…) I will visit that link and do some research. Since I did get the old “problem” 80 gigabyte drive in my desktop working with windows xp again I may just not even partition anything and leave windows on the old drive and keep the entire new drive to Opensuse, I think I may do that… :question:

However, would there be some competition between opensuse and windows when one system recognizes that there is another hard-drive to conquer? Am I risking a war? LOL! :sarcastic:

4

That may be the easiest approach.

I don’t know much about Windows.

But you have many approaches … For example, you could

  • dedicate your old drive to MS-Windows and dedicate the new drive to openSUSE Linux, … make openSUSE the “active” drive and put the grub boot manager on the openSUSE drive, such that when the PC boots, it goes to the active drive (openSUSE) which loads the boot manager, giving you a choice to continue booting to either the old drive (windows) or the new drive (openSUSE), or
  • leave both Windows and openSUSE on the old drive (if that is your current configuration) and make the new drive into “data drive” formatted in a format recognized by both Windows and openSUSE. Then simply modify your fstab file in openSUSE such that the new drive is automatically mounted by openSUSE on boot (easy to do … just ask for help on our forum) on to some mount point, such as /windows/D or something like that. (ie Windows recognizes it as D:, and openSUSE recognizes it as /windows/D ) . You could go for vfat or ntfs format.
  • … etc … (many other ideas)

In my case, because the physicall installation (screws, bolts, etc …) of the new 160GB drive appeared to be very difficult in my mother’s old PC, and given the closest PC store was a 45 minute car drive away for limited parts (2 hour car drive away was a superior PC store), and given the old 40GB drive was very old, I elected to simply remove the 7 year old 40GB drive and replace it with the new 160 GB drive.

There are many things you can do.