Last Friday I got a gadget – a mini digital camera. I have never seen this kind of gadgets in local stores… I suppose either because the shop owners shame to have such a item or because they are too greedy and there isn’t enough margin. Anyway the camera is a ViviCam 5 (pdf reader required for the link). And since this is a gift, I’m very happy to have received it for free.
Friday I took some shots and then I wanted to download them to my PC. So I switched on my desktop system and discovered that… Fedora Core 2 messed up something with GRUB and my Windows didn’t boot.
I use Windows mainly for playing games and for compatibility, moreover I didn’t want to spent huge amounts of time to resurrect Fedora Core 2 support for USB.
Saturday morning I tried to solve the thing. Apparently it seems that FC2 installer is somewhat broken and doesn’t always handle correctly the multiboot issue.
Luckily on www.fedorafaq.org there is a brief description on how to fix and some links for more detailed explanations.
Fixing involves two invocations of ‘sfdisk’ which is a stream line version of fdisk (sfdisk is to fdisk, what sed is to vi). Unfortunately the solution proposed in fedorafaq doesn’t work because the first sfdisk is issuing some warnings about disk geometry. I remember I got the same warning during installation. It is easy to get rid of such warnings by using an intermediate text file as described in one of the links.
So far so good, the pictures weren’t great, but funny for sure.
While I was playing with Fedora I tried to put USB back to work. After a bit of investigation I discovered that apparently the kernel doesn’t find the usbcore module which is the base for handling USB. A quick search through Internet showed up that I’m not alone, there is at least another Internet user who had the same problem. Unfortunately he (or she) didn’t get any sensible suggestion apart than recompiling the kernel.
I’m not afraid of recompiling the kernel, but it’s more a question of principle, not counting all the goods I get with a standard kernel (such as pre-compiled drivers).
Still convinced that reinstalling is the way to go.