Tag: troubleshooting

My Natty Narwhal problems

Last week I decided to update to the latest recent on my VMware version of the Ubuntu Desktop and it did not go well. During the upgrade I got a disk space error message with non-displayable characters. It was a curious message since I thought I had enough disk space and it did not stop the process. It was when I rebooted I encountered the major problem. I would like to tell you more about the error message but the screen clears and I am left with a GRUB prompt. That’s not nice!

So I did some research and booted using the instructions from this page, Express Boot to the Most Recent Kernel. Everything came up nicely except for my windows were missing the title bar when I came in via the NX client. To fix the booting problem, I reinstalled from the LiveCD using the simplest method. To fix the missing title bar I installed the latest version of NX client from NoMachine NX. I also got the missing title bar when I used the VMware console window to log in. In that case I just specified that I wanted to use the Classic interface when I logged in.

NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controller – Everything USB Community

I found myself troubleshooting a Verizon PC5470 wireless broadband issue today. This setup worked a couple of months ago when I last touched it. When my boss inserted the PC5470 card into his PC, the VZAccess Manager software could not talk to the card. We noticed that his PC would create two NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controller when the card was inserted and the device manager showed that a Curitel modem was unknown.  At the time I did not know what the Curitel modem was used for. When the card was installed on another PC only one NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controller was created and VZAccess manager was able to create a wireless broadband connection. After exhausting my troubleshooting tricks I found this conversation on the Internet, NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controller – Everything USB Community.  Although my solution was different than their recommendation, their ideas helped lead me in the right direction. My solution was to uninstall both NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controllers and force Windows to re-install all of the drivers. Disabling or uninstalling one driver did not work for me. When I inserted the PC card, Windows proceeded to re-install the drivers as expected. First it installed two NEC PCI to USB drivers. Next it tried to install the Curitel modem driver. During this process the PC announced that it was disabling a hardware device. When the driver installation was complete the Device Manager showed that the second PCI to USB driver was disabled and the Curitel modem was installed and functioning. When I started the VZ Access manager it found the PC5470 and configured itself to use the Curitel modem.  After a little bit more automatic updating by VZ Access manager, we were able to establish a wireless broadband connection. Whew!