Whenever you reinstall Windows with an existing Linux installation already present on the hard drive, the MBR gets an overwrite. You can restore GRUB to the previous settings by booting a Linux Live CD and following the steps below: 1. Insert the Live CD and reboot your computer; 2. After reaching the desktop, open up… Read More »
If for whatever reason you wish not to use your Linux SWAP anymore, you can use the swapoff command. Do a swapon -s to see to which partition SWAP belongs to then a free -mt to check available memory. If you still want to give up your SWAP, try a swapoff /dev/hdxx where /dev/hdxx is… Read More »
An even better and cleaner method than the reset button is to use Ctrl+Alt+Del. When even that doesn’t work and the system has frozen, there’s always hope. Hold down Alt+SysRq and press the following keys in order: R,E,I,S,U,B. Partitions will be unmounted cleanly, processes will be closed forcefully and the system should reboot soon afterwards.
Bad sectors are the bruises of your harddisk. To check if a harddisk is in good shape, we can use its SMART capabilities: smartctl -t long /dev/hda To check for bad sectors, use badblocks -sv /dev/hda