BloggUccio

After fourteen months of glorious service my battery decided to not recharge anymore: it recharges normally from 0% to 13%, when it suddenly stop recharging.
My warranty expired two months ago, all the same I learned Battery warranty covers only one year irrespective of the extension. Batteries are consumable products and they lose charge easily upon usage and hence they carry only one year warranty from the date of purchase.
So I could only give a ring to the call center and they said the solution is to replace the motherboard with a charge of about 300€. They also said to try another battery, but it probably won’t work.

I searched online this problem and I found many people having the same (or similar problem). For example this, and this.

It is very disheartening to learn my (almost) new computer won’t have a battery anymore.
Thank you very much DELL for your “high quality” laptop.

In my next life I want to live my life backwards.
You start out dead and get that out of the way.
Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day.
You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day.
You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement.
You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school.
You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play.
You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born.
And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!

I rest my case.

Woody Allen

Last week I finally decided switching to the new Ubuntu distribution: Intrepid Ibex.

I decided to format both partitions (root and home), but unfortunately Windows stopped to access to the home partition, recognizing it as RAW and suggesting me to format it!

I used the freeware Ext2IFS to let Windows access to the Ext3 home partition, so I statrted looking for a solution in the troubleshooting section of its website. Its suggestion was to execute a little program to analyze the partition. Here it is the result:

The volume has an Ext2/Ext3 file system, but the Ext2 IFS 1.11 software did not mount it because the file system has an inode size unequal to 128 bytes (inode size: 256 bytes).
The only way to solve it is to back up the volume’s files and format the file system: give the mkfs.ext3 utility the -I 128 switch. Finally, restore all backed-up files.
After that, the Ext2 IFS software should be able to access the volume.

WOW! What a nice solution!

Searching deeply in Google I found that new Linux distributions, like Ubuntu, use the new 256 bytes size for inodes, making many of the Ext2/3 drivers that are now available on web unusable on Windows.

Fortunately, there’s a driver that runs with 256 bytes inodes: Ext2fsd. I’m using it since few hours but it looks like running well.