Fedora Core 6 on Latitude X200

Recently, I received a HP laptop as a gift. This little x200 thus could finally be turned into a 100% linux machine as I wished for a long time. Since it was in dual boot (WinXP and Fedora core 2) for roughly a year. I expected that the FC6 would work perfectly. Oh, well, life seems a little rougher this time.

I already installed FC6 on my other two desktops without any 'extra' problems. 'Extra' means more than expected :-) All of my desktops are 64bit, it was nature to install 64bit instead of 32bit for me. I hated my decision on this 64bit FC6. The firefox addons problem is just simply annoying. There are some ways to get around of it, but I was too tired to try them out.

Ok, my little x200 is 32bit. There shouldn't be any problem then. Yes, on flash player addon side, it was true. But wait, we were not there yet. Before we could see the pretty screen, trouble came! It wouldn't start. GRUB WOULD NOT START. I was panic at the beginning. Since this laptop is about 5 years old, I was thinking to replace the hard drive although there was nothing wrong with it. (I just experienced a hard drive failure on my desktop a month ago.) My immediate thought was there must be some bad sections on this poor old hard drive. So I did partition again, and reinstall FC6. The same problem was still there! It was thus not the poor little hard drive then. Let's work on THE PROBLEM itself, the grub. It turned out the solution was simple, just replace the grub with a working one. Reboot the machine, runs smoothly thereafter. It would save me some time if I worked directly on the problem.

As Confucius said, Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated.