Finding my way back...

After completing the Freeciv assignment for last class, I ran into some unexpected troubles.  Some package that I was required to install managed to corrupt my Windows registry.  When I returned to my computer later and rebooted I was unable to access either my Ubuntu system or my Windows user profile.  Since mine was the only visible account with administrative privileges, I was rather stuck.  When I booted into Safe Mode I was able to access my account and perform a back-up.  After a few hours of emotional turmoil and backing up my computer, I was drained and had to walk away.  Actually, I didn't walk away. I lied down right where I was and took a nap.

About an hour and a half later my dad, my personal Windows guru, called me to help me work out my problem.  My dad has been a computer scientist working for Chevron for over 25 years and has a lot of experience with troubleshooting.  He also seems to know Windows inside and out!  He led me through a secret back door of Safe Mode to grant administrative privileges to another user profile.  Here is the secret:

1. In Safe Mode run a command terminal as administrator.
2. Enter the command $ net localgroup administrators <UserProfile> /add
3. At this point you can reboot in normal mode and access the user profile to which you just granted admin privileges.  

From there you can create a new account with admin privileges and move your files from your old account to your new account.  Your settings will not be transferred, but that is simple enough to set up again.  This is the process my dad led me through after diagnosing that the problem is in fact a registry problem.  Then we called it a night.

After this I still needed to get Ubuntu installed on my machine and catch up to where I was with my SugarLabs project.  I was hesitant to use Wubi again since that allowed some damage to my Windows installation, but I am also not a fan of VirtualBox.  I had heard of people booting into Ubuntu using a flash drive and began investigating a way to do that. 

Most of the instructions I found were to have a fresh install every time you boot up, not a persistent boot.  I finally found some instructions to create a persistent bootable Ubuntu flash drive.  I admit I was nervous going into this but I didn't see another way, so I started following the instructions.  To my utter delight and surprise, everything went smoothly!  When it was time to use the flash drive I was a bit lost, though.  The instructions show that during a boot the screen should show a few special keys for book options.  Unfortunately, my screen does not, so I rebooted several times trying different keys mentioned in their example.  Finally I chose F2 which brought me to the boot menu.  I managed to figure out how to tell my computer to boot from the flash drive and tried it.  AND IT WORKED!

In order to make sure that this was a persistent boot I changed a few settings and created a document.  Then I rebooted to see if the changes stuck and they did!  Now to make sure that Windows still booted properly...shut down the computer, remove flash drive, boot up...and Windows works fine!  Finally, it was time to get back to SugarLabs.  Maybe that is something better saved for another blog.  Here, suffice it to say that I'm getting back on track.  My registry is still not fixed so I will continue to work on that, along with using subversion for future backups, but I think that will be an ongoing learning process.