I was hoping that the newer version of Kubuntu would take care of the problem. After installing it I was still getting the same behavior I had experienced with Slackware; instant lockup as soon as I tried to touch the partition.

In preparation for a new external hard drive purchase I decided to dig into this problem.

With the drive completely unmounted (even the partitions that were working fine) I ran an fsck check on the partitions. Since the partition is an ext3 file system I ran the following command:

sudo fsck.ext3 /dev/sdb2

Sudo gives me root privileges. fsck.ext3 is the fs (file system) ck (check) specific for ext3 formatted partitions. The /dev/sdb2 means that I ran it on my second drive and second partition of that drive.

After putting in my root password I got a bunch of output that said:

Free blocks count wrong for group #XX ...

It asked it I wanted to fix it and I replied yes to the couple of hundred requests.

Apparently the drive was not cleanly unmounted. By running fsck I allowed it to clean up the corrupted table that said where all the data lived. While my drive is a traditional internal drive, this is a good lesson as to why you should always eject USB drives, or any type of media, before popping them out of your computer. That is true for whatever operating system you are running.

I am pleased to have recovered the 28 GB of photos that I had on there. I have most of them backed up in various locations, but do not have a full backup in one place. Since today is Thanksgiving I guess I should say I am thankful for having finally gotten to the bottom of this and that tomorrow is Black Friday and I am able to pick up an external HD that will back up all the computers on my network with room to spare.

Now, where is that coupon code for those online backup solutions?

I started reading a blog a few months back that has helped me with some of the more detailed uses of OOo. Though I certainly don’t have as much heavy daily use for OOo as some people, I have enjoyed reading Solveig Haugland’s OpenOffice.org Training blog. She has some very detailed how-to articles at the site as well as some great articles on how to make the transition to OOo.

If you see an article that does not apply to you at the time, just skim over it and know that it is there. You might be surprised by how often you find yourself going back to the site to check out a how-to that you previously skimmed over. Solveig has a great way of simplifying a complex process.

There is a lot of good stuff in her archives. Be sure to search around for tutorials. I used to hit the forums when I needed help. Now, before I go to the forums, I check out Solveig’s site.