What To Do If You Leave Your Ubuntu 7.10 Server Install CD In Your Mac Mini
You’d have to be pretty dumb to do this. In fact, if you have done it, I wouldn’t recommend you tell anyone lest they laugh at you.
So a “friend of mine” left their Ubuntu 7.10 Server Install CD in their mac mini with Ubuntu 7.10 Server already installed and configured. This lead to the following path of shame:
- He turned off his mac mini, moved it to another part of his room and turned it back on.
- He forgot about it for a few weeks.
- He decided to spend Christmas evening getting his mac mini to deliver media to his xbox 360.
- He couldn’t figure out why his mac mini wasn’t on the network.
- After rebooting it again, he realised the CD was in the drive and there was no manual eject pinhole on the chassis! (Gah!)
- Nor would the PC boot from the “First Hard Drive” (some bootup parameter not set right perhaps?)
The only solution I could find was to:
- Choose to install the CD onto the harddisc.
- Press escape within the installer to give a list of various install steps.
- Choose to detect the CD. Get to the point where the installer starts configuring the network.
- Press escape again to go back to the install steps.
- Choose to detect hardware (your harddiscs). Get to the point where the installer starts configuring the network.
- Press escape again to go back to the install steps.
- Choose to bring up a shell.
- Running
fdisk -lwill show that the Mac Mini harddisc with the current Ubuntu install is on/dev/sda1. - Mount the harddisc to an accessible node by running the command
/mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /target. - Run the command
/target/usr/bin/eject /cdrom.
Et voila! Couldn’t have been easier now, could it? Well, a proper Linux expert could probably find an easier way, but since all the Internet could advise was for me to disassemble the Mini (erm, no), I’m calling this a win.
Heh heh heh, at least South Park is still funny.