After using XP on my Toshiba NB205 netbook for a while, I decided to finally spent some time getting Ubuntu Netbook Remix to work correctly on it. Things went bad. Very very bad… The first thing I did was use gparted to shrink my XP partition, and then created a new partition and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix from a USB drive.
First off, the following will not work correctly without a lot of fighting in Ubuntu on the NB205 right now,
- Wireless (easy fix)
- Bluetooth (not so easy fix)
- Sound (speakers will not work without throwing away ALSA and using OSS sound system)
- Hibernation (couldn’t find a fix)
- Hard Drive Shock Protection (no fix exists right now)
- Battery life goes down over an hour, I believe because of the CPU scaling not being enabled
I’m used to tweaking Linux to work, so fine. The bad things happened when I attempted to pick Windows XP from the Grub boot menu and was greeted with a blue screen of death and reboot. To stop the reboot when you get a BSOD in XP, you can hit F8 when booting and there is an advanced option to disable that. After that I managed to figure out the error,
STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x85BD2490, 0xC0000102, 0x00000000)
Lovely error, isn’t it? Spending some time Googling revealed this,
This issue can occur if a problem occurred within the Ntfs.sys file. The Ntfs.sys file is the driver file that enables your computer to read and write to NTFS partitions. Damage in the NTFS file system, damaged portions of your hard disk, or damaged SCSI or IDE drivers can also cause this issue.
It looks like Gparted inside the Ubuntu installer, for whatever reason, messes up the NTFS partition. The fix seems to be easy, you just run CHKDSK. Only problem being, this netbook doesn’t have a CD drive, a floppy drive, and I also don’t have the recovery disks because Toshiba does not send them.
First idea, look for Linux tools. This didn’t go anywhere, Linux can hardly mount NTFS, no less fix it.
Second idea, use a BartPE disk on a USB drive. I got this to boot, but I can’t get the drivers to see the hard drive on the netbook. I even dumped all the drivers from the recovery partition onto the BartPE build, but it still will not see the hard drive.
Third idea, NTFS4DOS. This just sits there at a blinking icon like this guy said.
Fouth idea, use the recovery partition option in GRUB and just give up on Linux for the day. This gave me the following errors,
“Windows cannot find C:\Bin\ErrorDialog.exe”
“Windows cannot find C:\BootPriority.exe”
Fifth idea, there is a file on the recovery partition (which crashes just like XP) called base.iso. I pulled this out and extracted the files. Using a combination of PE2USB and 7-zip I tried to get this to boot off a USB drive, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it to boot properly.
Finally, I managed to get it to boot into the recovery partition. I was so excited that it actually booted into it after 6 hours of trying to get my laptop to boot that I did a full system restore and didn’t tempt fate by experimenting further. What I did was, remove the “savedefault” option from the grub entry on the recovery partition. Why did this work? I haven’t the faintest idea. The menu.lst file mentioned,
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use ‘savedefault’ or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
But I wasn’t even using the saved option to begin with. Maybe I did something else before and this wasn’t actually the solution, because I can hardly believe such a GRUB option would cause the troubles getting into the recovery partition. Whatever the cause of this entire mess between XP and Ubuntu on the NB200/NB205, I’m not alone. The following posts show other people with the same problem and no solutions,
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1272853
http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7800396
At the moment, I’m just glad XP is back to running… and would NOT recommend trying to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a Toshiba NB200/NB205 without backing up the hard drive, especially the recovery partition, and be ready to run into a lot of issues.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use 'savedefault' or your # array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
PherricOxide's Software Engineering Blog 
Hi – ran into the exact same issue as you, with an NB205 and UNR installer seemingly breaking the Windows MBR. Anyway, I tried your suggesting to remove the savedefault line from GRUB, but still no luck getting the Recovery partition working.
Do you remember what else you may have done to get that back up and running? Thanks
I’m afraid not, I thought it was rather odd that it started working when I removed that one GRUB option. One thing you might try,
Hold down the 0 key when booting (the Toshiba way to load the recovery partition) and then select the recovery entry from Grub. It’s just a guess at something I might have did differently that caused it to work that one time.
For next time …
1. Prepare — you need an external hard drive that you can connect via USB port, and an external CD/DVD drive or a spare USB memory stick of 2GB or larger capacity.
2. Download the Parted Magic Live CD ISO and make a Parted Magic Live CD, or if you don’t have an external CD/RW drive, make a bootable Parted Magic USB stick (Google will take you there). Study up a little on Clonezilla (Google will take you there, too.)
3. Open the box and take out your brand new netbook with the Win XP factory installation. DO NOT TURN IT ON, YET. Review the manual for long enough to confirm how you enter BIOS Setup and change to USB boot.
4. Now, boot your Parted Magic external CD or USB stick.
5. Connect an external hard drive via USB, verify it’s got 10GB of space available somewhere, and start Clonezilla.
6. Use Clonezilla to make an image of the netbook’s hard drive or SSD, and save the image on the external hard drive. For the Toshiba NB205, it’s about a 6GB image.
4. Now, you can begin to play with your Linux candidates, unless you are the last person on Earth who wonders what Windows XP looks like. I didn’t like the Ubuntu NR desktop at all, and the Kubuntu repo was not cooperating the day I needed that netbook remix. I installed sidux KDE lite, and then Elive (development version). The E17 desktop seemed most responsive, although sidux looks good. For E, I needed to install gsynaptics and disable tapping, to keep it from spurting the menu up every time I moved the mouse cursor. After that it was fine.
Sound works perfectly with the OSS driver, wireless networking works better with wicd than with Knemo, I don’t use Bluetooth so I dunno whether it works or not.
But, if anything does go wrong, I can restore the Toshiba to the factory-new configuration with Clonezilla, and go from there, including sending it back for repair/replacement during the warranty period.
After getting Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 to work (stable network and headphone only sound) in dual boot mode. I had inconsistent boot up time from 45s to 3 minutes. I found
that changing the SATA bios to Compatibility (instead of ACHI?) got it down to 45s consistently. But since hibernate didn’t work for me, I decided to get Windows working.
That’s when I discovered Windows was inaccessible and unrecoverable.
Trying suggestions from different posts didn’t help. Windows would hang at loading mup.sys or when attempting to recover, I got “unable to find C:\bin\errordialog and
C:\bin\bootpriority.exe”.
But I eventually was able to restore the original factory image from the recovery partition. I don’t know which specific step was key but here are the steps leading to it:
1. Remove partitions (/dev/sda5 and /dev/sda6) created by the ubuntu install in an attempt to restore the drive to its original state.
2. Merge the deleted partitions back into the main windows partition (/dev/sda1)
3. Reset the MBR on /dev/sda1 to windows
4. Set the boot flag on sda1 (or was it sda2?)
(1 & 2) Removing Ubuntu partitions and merging with the original windows partition:
My attempt at installing Ubuntu with dual boot options resulted in two more partitions (/dev/sda5 and /dev/sda6). The resulting partition table looked like this:
/dev/sda1: windows partition
/dev/extended logical(?)
/dev/sda5: ubuntu linux
/dev/sda6: swap
/dev/sda2: toshiba recovery
My solution was to use gparted from the systemrecuecd (www.sysresccd.org) booting from a USB drive. I used unetbootin and the system rescue cd image from their site (rather
than have unetbootin download it). Having unetbootin download seem inconsistent. System rescue cd will complain about not being able to find a linux image and it will promp
for a login but it will boot up properly if you leave it unattended for a 30s or more.
Run gparted and delete sda5 and sda6. Only after deleting sda5 and sda6 will it allow you to remove the extended logical(?) partition.
Tell gparted to perform these queued actions before continuing.
Now use gparted to resize sda1 to include/merge with the deleted partions above.
Tell gparted to perform these queued actions before continuing.
(3) Resetting the MBR on the windows partition:
While still in System Rescue CD, I used TestDisk (under System Tools menu):
Run TestDisk, choose No Log.
Select /dev/sda, then Intel.
Select MBR Code, then Y to “Write a new copy of MBR code to first sector? (Y/N)”
(4) Set the boot flag
Here’s where my memory is hazy (it was late). I used gparted to set the boot flag on sda1, rebooted, it didn’t boot, booted back into System Rescue CD, set the boot flag on
sda2 instead, then it successfully booted into the Toshiba Recovery tool. Or the order was reversed, that is I set the boot flag on sda2 first then sda1. If the first
approach doesn’t work try the second.
This worked for me. I make no guarantee it will work for you, but it’s worth trying.
BTW, once the recovery tool has restored the partitions to factory state, it apparently isn’t done yet and has to individually install and reboot per components like Norton
Security, then Atheros, and on and on… Initially I didn not pay close attention to why it kept rebooting and I thought it was stuck in a loop. I redid the recovery again
then realized it was rebooting each component install. I let it do it’s thing and by morning I had a factory fresh netbook again.
If this worked for you, please spread the word. In my research to find a solution, I noticed a number of people having the same problem.
Good luck.
I just experienced the same problem as the one described above. I did pretty much exactly what pherricoxide had done. Taken my perfectly working NB205 laptop with Windows XP. And used the Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix installation to shrink my XP partition, add the required partitions, and installed Ubuntu 9.10. My NB205 worked just as everyone else’s under linux. When I decided to boot up XP just to test it, it failed, exactly as described above.
Over the course of the day I tried, and failed to fix the XP partition so that it would boot up, and the HD RECOVERY partition so I could get into the recovery console. All failed with the same errors described above. I even have a old Windows XP Home Premium OEM CD that I tried to use to boot from, but it was an original version from before SP1, and it failed to boot up also. I am assuming because it didn’t have the SATA drivers that are needed to boot up a SATA drive. Inspiration hit me about 2 hours ago. I had a Vista Home Premium OEM DVD. I didn’t know if it would work to repair XP, but I booted it up using my old obsolete XBOX 360 HD-DVD player plugged into the NB205 USB port, and let it boot. When it got to the recovery console, I told myself not to get excited yet. When the recovery console reached the step to select the operating system I wanted to fix, and none were listed, I saw that note above the selection box that said: “Only Vista OS’s can be repaired”… My heart sank. But I hit next, expecting to see that a selection had to be made to continue. But what did I see? I saw a menu of choices!!! Without missing a beat I clicked on command line, and had a wonderful DOS screen, with blinking prompt, I couldn’t have been happier. I entered, DIR C:, and was greeted with, this drive is corrupt, no data available. No problem, I wasn’t shocked. So I went further and entered DIR D:, DIR E:, DIR F:… and so on, just to make sure I saw all the partitions I knew were on my hard drive. I could not see the linux partitions, but I wasn’t surprised since they were formated in EXT4, and I doubted that any windows version could access an EXT4 partition. Next I entered chkdsk c:, and it said that there was a corrupt field in the table, but couldn’t be fixed in read only mode. It also listed the drive label as the NB205’s XP partition, so I went for it, chkdsk C: /R After almost a hour, it was done, and the only problem was the corrupt entry in characteristics table, which was deleted. Holding my breath, I restarted the PC, selected the Windows XP selection, and waited! Success!!! I now have a fully restored Windows XP, with no data loss, and a fully working Ubuntu 9.10 Netboot Remix boot partition, with the exceptions that everyone else has, not perfect but working.
I hope this helps someone.
Robm15
@ Robm15
Thank you very much for your post. It is indeed very helpful.
I have experieneced exactly the same problem. But I checked whether I could boot Windows XP on my Toshiba NB205 *before* installing Linux (Fedora 13, in my case), so I know that it was ‘gparted’ that was responsible for the corrupted Windows XP NTFS file system. I performed resizing of the NTFS partition (from around 150GB to 60GB) on a never used before NB205, and ‘gparted’ still couldn’t make the resing right.
When trying to boot Windows XP, the boot sequence has been getting to the abrupt end right after loading the MUP.SYS driver. After some prolonged ‘research’ I found that it was most likely NTFS.SYS driver that had been having problems and had been causing the reboot loop.
What is it in the NTFS driver in the Windows XP shipped with Toshiba NB205 that makes the NTFS file system resized by ‘gparted’ unreadable? The same file system could be accessed without any problems from Fedora 13.
In fixing the ‘corrupt NTFS partition’ problem the hardest part for me proved to be preparing a bootable USB flash drive with the Windows Recovery Console on it. Working instructions can be found here:
http://tuts4tech.net/2009/07/14/creating-a-usb-bootable-xp-recovery-console/
(read my comment posted there on June 25, 2010)
When I succeeded, I booted into the Console from the USB flash drive, and then executed
dir
in the drive C:
In return, I got an error message. Then I switched to drive D: and repeated ‘dir’. This revealed that the USB flash drive was drive D: , thus, I deduced, the (corrupt) NTFS file system must have been Drive C:
Then I executed
chkdsk C:
without any flags and after just a few seconds I got back the prompt. A message said that an error in the file system had been detected.
In C: I tried the ‘dir’ command again. This time it worked fine and showed the contents of C:\ , so I decided to exit the Recovery Console and try to boot Windows XP (via the GRUB bootlader).
The boot-up went smoothly. I had my Windows XP up again. Since then I have performed numerous boot-ups and shutdowns, installed several external programs and performed countless Microsoft updates. Not once I experienced any problem while booting or shutting down Windows XP.
One more thing, concerned with using wireless on Toshiba NB205. The latter doesn’t have a hardware wireless switch. Instead, wireless/Bluetooth must be turned ON (or OFF) *in Windows* using a Toshiba application. This is done by pressing the Fn key and while holding Fn and pressing repeatedly the F8 key to chose the proper combination among the following four:
wireless on / Bluetooth off
wireless off / Bluetooth on
both on
both off
with Windows running. Only after you do that, and after you check that Windowss sees wireless networks, you should shut down and boot into your Linux. When I logged into my Fedora 13 GNOME desktop, the wireless was present and wireless networks detected. Connecting to the one I needed was then a quick formality.
Before I performed what I describe above, no amount of tinkering was able to activate wireless in Fedora. And I want to point out that the wireless setting in BIOS was ON all the time (I checked this, and not once).