goeff, in what area in israel do you live ?
On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 4:28 PM, Geoff Shang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I hate to ask for this sort of thing but it sometimes goes with the > territory. > > My wife's PC is a dual boot machine with Debian Syd and Windows XP pro. > due to what appears to have been a bad IDE cable and some other things I > won't go into, it has gotten into a state where Grub can't boot XP (the > default OS) and might not be able to boot Debian either. > > The reason why I say "might not", and the whole point for posting, is that > both > my wife and I are blind and can't read the error messages from Grub. We > are able to load speech output software once the OS is loaded, and I have > a > Ubuntu Feisty CD here with built-in speech software which I can use to > alter the Grub configuration, but I cannot actually read Grub's output at > all. I can see when there are things on the screen so I have some idea > if > it is booting or has failed some kind of test, but I can't actually read > anything. > > When I had a pair of eyes here yesterday, two things were happening. The > first was that Grub was seeing the drives the wrong way around. This is a > bit of a moving target as the Ubuntu Cd seems to bring them up in a random > order, but I think I have fixed this by changing the device map file under > Grub. But I can't verify this. > > The second error was that the filesystem for the Windows partition was > being listed as unknown and it refused to boot it. This has me more > worried. I've been reading things online about LBA and such, but I'm > perhaps a little worried that maybe the partition has more serious > problems > with it. Any suggestions on how to fsck NTFS partitions would be helpful. > I can mount the partition under the Ubuntu live CD however so it's not > completely messed up. > > The other thing that was happening is that the probe for the drive would > fail at times, so I bought a new IDE cable for it today. Hopefully that > problem is now solved. > > My wife is growing increasingly frustrated. I'm reluctant to take the PC > to a shop because in all likelihood it's a Grub issue and my chances of > finding a computer lab where they know about Grub are not that high. So > I'd be having to do the direction on that and here I have other PCs with > speech software to search the web with - in a shop I'd have nothing. > > So right now what I really need is a pair of eyes to help with screen > output. Technical knowledge is not really an issue, though of course it > would be useful. Only prerequisites are the ability to read and speak > English, plus some patience. Sorry, I don't really speak much Hebrew and > I'd rather not go through my wife on this sort of stuff. > > If anyone is able to help or can provide more light on my problems, please > feel free to write back or call me on 052 853 2827 > > Geoff. > > > ================================================================= > To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with > the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command > echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
