Blacklisting a driver

For new computers, there can be a lot of tinkering involved. Ever since I bought a new Asus desktop computer, I've been doing a lot of that - and it's been great! If only the building process took a little bit longer than 25mins :(...

Generally, I've found Ubuntu Linux great for computers. Both of my laptops have worked well - after a clean installation of Ubuntu, all my hardware is usually detected correctly. It's quite pleasant. When clean installing Windoze on the other hand - I have to hunt around the web and download the exact driver for the exact model hardware. But I won't go there.

This will be a quick blog about the Realtek LAN card on my new computer (see specs below). The problem: the driver loaded by Ubuntu, r8169, appears to be faulty once the clean installation is complete and I upgrade all necessary packages. Solution: install the driver from the Realtek website, r8168, restart /etc/init.d/networking and you should be fine.

Desktop specs:
Motherboard: ASUS M5A88-M
Realtek Card (on-board): 8111E/8168B

But, Ubuntu tries to be clever (and I enjoy it when it does :D) and resets the driver to r8169 when you restart the computer. So one solution put to me was to blacklist the r8169 and set the r8168 as the default (NB: my terminology is incorrect, r8168 may not be the correct name for the 'driver'). praseodym from UbuntuForums gave me this suggestion, and the method for implementation is at this UF thread.

Alternatively, I came across another thread which appears to be a duplicate of my problem - although worded differently. The suggestion here is to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.39 and the problem should go away.

Seeing as my system is running and has a continuous connection...I might try that another time.

Why fix it if it ain't broke?

Ciao!

Update - 28 Nov 2011:
There was an update just the other day of a few hundred meg, after which I found that I was having trouble with my connection. What I found was that the 'new' driver had been reinstalled and thus started giving me the up/down problem again. Had to back track a bit because I had forgotten just how I installed it last time.

The Realtek driver download was fine, but because I'm running kernel version 3.0, I suspect that the autorun.sh file was unable to execute properly. Did a quick search and found this website with a run down for those not on 2.4x or 2.6x linux systems.

Connection is working now. :D!

Windows USB Bootable

Much of the last weekend was spent trying to figure out how to make a USB Flash drive bootable for a Windows installation. This is no simple task, especially if you don't have a spare Windows computer up and running. But if you do, then you are in luck.

Before I attempted to use the Windows app, I did try several Linux options. UnetBootin, the CLI dd command were both promising options (see links below). However, the system I was trying to clean install did not have the appropriate boot options and so the drive was not detected on startup. This may have been a problem that was unique to me, so I would advise giving these options a go...then as a last resort, use the Windows app (Note: You won't turn into a blood-sucking parasite for using this method, but you will feel strange afterwards).

So, yes, if you want to make a Windows 7 bootable USB Flash, then I went to the Microsoft website and downloaded it an ran it on a Windows machine. Link here. Until I can find another way to do it, this will have to do.

Ciao!

Links:
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/10/create-bootable-windows-7-usb-drive.html
Good, but didn't work for me - http://serverfault.com/questions/6714/how-to-make-windows-7-usb-flash-install-media-from-linux

Update: 20 Dec 2011

Good news everyone! lol...link to the Professor Farnsworth, because it's worth it.

But on a serious note, I have just found a a simpler way to make a Windows USB boot drive. And by simpler, I mean on the command line :P.

The video here tells it all, but I'll summarize here, for the sake of documentation. Big thanks to uniquefree, as I for one would never have figured this out.

Briefly, the method:

1. wipes and formats the usb drive using FAT32 or NTFS file system
2. copies the files from the Windows CD/DVD straight over to the drive

I'll have to give this a go in Linux. However, at present, I'm not having much luck reading/writing to NTFS or FAT32 usb file systems :(.

Format the USB

For this example, we want to copy files from a CD/DVD drive or even a mounted .iso image at the location D:\, to our USB which will be F:\. This will obviously be different for you.

Start by partitioning the USB, using DISKPART and the following commands:

C:\>DISKPART
DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk 3
DISKPART> clean
DISKPART> create partition primary
DISKPART> select partition 1
DISKPART> active
DISKPART> format fs=fat32
DISKPART> assign
DISKPART> exit

You still need a windows computer for this one. Open the command prompt, cmd.exe, and type in DISKPART. This program should come preinstalled. The first few commands are important. Use 'list dist' to print out all the drives that have been detected by Windows. Like uniqueparts' video, there will be corresponding number down the left hand side of the output. Find the number that corresponds to the USB drive that you want to move the files to, and use it with the next command. This is important because if you choose the wrong number, the usb drive may not work (because the files were never copied there).

Uniquepart makes this quite clear, so I thought I'd do the same. I'm wondering if the 'Quick format' option that some people are familiar with would still make a bootable usb, but as yet, the longer format option given here is the way that works.


Now, the USB is ready, copy the files over using xcopy:

C:\>xcopy D:\*.* /s/e/f F:\

And you should have it!

This method is much more appealing to me and I hope it makes installs much more pleasant for those who use Windows...hehehe.

Ciao!