Fun with MBR and partition tables

I use Ubuntu as my primary operating system. Because I needed Visual Studio for college, I also installed Windows 7 on the same hard-drive.

To be able to access files on the Linux partition, I installed a little program called Ext2Fsd. Unfortunately, it wasn’t updated to work with Ext4 partitions so, yesterday, I decided to uninstall it. After restarting the machine, GRUB wouldn’t load; the partition table was busted.

This is the process I went through to make everything go back to normal:

Deleting GRUB

  1. Get a Windows 7 .iso image
  2. Burn it to a USB stick using Windows USB/DVD Tool
  3. Boot from the stick drive
  4. Choose “Repair Windows”
  5. In the Command Promt, type Bootrec.exe /FixMbr

At this point, I was able to boot Windows. In hindsight, I could have skipped this part completely.

Rebuilding the partition table

  1. Get an Ubuntu 10.04 .iso image
  2. Burn it to a USB stick using UNetbootin
  3. Boot from the stick drive
  4. Recover Ubuntu partition using gpart
  5. Re-install Grub

In hindsight, I could have ran gpart directly under Windows.

Anyway, back to work…

AWN 0.4 is awesome!

Avant Window Navigator is a dock-like window and launcher manager for Linux. The newest version (0.4) is available for testing.

Why is it awesome? Because it allows me to combine the two boring Gnome panels into one slick OS X / Windows 7 like dock.

I placed it on the right side to maximize the available vertical space, which is very scarce on my laptop screen:

AWN in action

After deleting the first Gnome panel, I found out that the second one can’t be removed. So I set it to auto-hide instead and put the AWN panel over it. It works suprisingly well.

I didn’t like the reflections so I set the Panel Offset to 0 in Dock Preferences -> Advanced.

I also set the Notification area background color to gray, so that the icons shipped with Ubuntu Jaunty look alright.

Now it’s just the way I like it. :D

You can read more about the new version over at OMG! UBUNTU!