When it’s connected by USB, this is the dmesg output:

usb 7-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
usb 7-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Linux video capture interface: v2.00
gspca: main v2.7.0 registered
gspca: probing 0ac8:0302
zc3xx: probe sif 0x0000
zc3xx: probe sensor -> 000a
zc3xx: Find Sensor PB0330. Chip revision 0
gspca: probe ok
usbcore: registered new interface driver zc3xx
zc3xx: registered
usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio

Apparently important part of lsmod after insert:

snd_usb_audio          92747  1
snd_usb_lib            19193  1 snd_usb_audio
gspca_zc3xx            49253  0
gspca_main             25031  1 gspca_zc3xx
videodev               40518  1 gspca_main

And finally – part of a lsusb listing:

Bus 007 Device 003: ID 0ac8:0302 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0302 Webcam
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               1.10
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0
  bDeviceProtocol         0
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x0ac8 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp.
  idProduct          0x0302 ZC0302 Webcam
  bcdDevice            1.00
  iManufacturer           1
  iProduct                2
  iSerial                 0
  bNumConfigurations      1

Safe mode just hung at loading mup.sys. Recovery console didn’t work, cause it wouldn’t accept empty as an administrator password (hey – it’s not my laptop, I actually do use a password on my admin account) and booting the XP install cd to do a repair installation was also useless – the installation procedure didn’t even find the older XP installation. Google, Microsoft and random nerds over the net suggested only one thing: Reinstallation.

My favorite hd-testing program came back with some hints – broken clusters. “Boot in Windows to fix” – thank you very much for that tip. Gah.
So, no safe mode, no scandisk, no repair installation, no recovery console – what’s left? System restore?
But system restore isn’t really an option – you need to boot into XP to do that one, right? Turned out Not!

The files that system restore keeps saving apparently ends up in c:\System volume information\_rp[something]\snapshots – underneath there are some interesting files – “_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE” for instance. These are apparently the same files that are hidden in c:\windows\system32\config – and replacing those files could restore the messed up registry!

So, up with a Ubuntu livecd, boot up and mount the trashed harddrive (needed to run ntfsfix first though) – and using a terminal window copying the files was a few minutes work. I suppose making a backup copy of them first sounds like a good idea.
So I copied “SECURITY”, “SAM”, “SOFTWARE” and “SYSTEM” from the latest folder under snapshots and replaced those in \config\ and rebooted.

What do you know – it actually worked!
After a repair c boot and reboot, I was able to login and everything seems to work just perfect!

Update:
A complete scandisk later showed that the software registry file that XP complained about was located exactly on the one broken cluster on the harddrive. So that’s why XP went into panic – one sign that this harddrive (a Hitachi btw) has had it’s happy days for sure.
Would a complete scandisk have solved everything without booting Ubuntu, copying here and there, etc? Who knows.

Anyway – I ran fdisk (I was slightly drunk) to find out which partition was messing around and was told that something was confused about the partition table – do a write to correct fdisk so cunnigly tricked me.
Fdisk and “w” caused an empy partition table to be written to /dev/sdf – thank you oh so very much.
500gb of precious, precious internet material (no pr0n, promise, promise) all gone into binary heaven.

Anyway – to the Ubuntu forums, and found my way to Testdisk – which is really a nifty program, only it does not like to recover Apple/Mac partitions… Since this drive was earlier used as the main storage drive in my Ubuntu PPC Server  it had a Apple/Mac partition table.
Testdisk found the partition really quickly, even showed me those precious, precious files (again, no pr0n) but to recover? Oh no, oh no – “Function write_part_mac not implemented” – and tells me to use “pdisk” instead. Pdisk is apparently a Mac program – nicey, nicey….

Now, panic was not really seeping in (ok, yes it was) since I’ve done something similar before – I lost power to a computer and the partition table was all gone and that time I managed to repair it with some DOS partition program. That was a Windows machine though. This is a Apple partition in a non-Apple computer. And the G4 Mac I used before is somewhere else and certainly without Mac OS…

But Testdisk gave me some clues – the partition started at 64 and ended at 976768063 and I should be able to enter those in something else except that “pdisk” thingy…

So at my disposal is “cfdisk”, “fdisk”, “parted”, “gparted”, and some others – which one is the magic application to use? Cfdisk and Fdisk didn’t seem to have any way of making a Mac partition, but parted did!
Starting parted (on the right drive, not without arguments – that will end up Bad[tm], especially with a few beers down the throat) there’s the command “mklabel” – it will create a partition table type and accepts “mac” as a type.

Next step is creating the partition – it started at 64 and ended at that other number – only parted seems to be asking me for kilobytes, megabytes? The first partion goes from 0 to 32kb? Hmmm..
Enter “units” command – and with “s” for sectors things gets very much understandable – the first area (I suppose the label or partition table) starts at 0 and ends at 63. My partition started at 64 according to Testdisk! Interesting!
Mkpart in parted fills in the final blank – a new partition starting at 64, ending at that big number, type ext3 and then, like magic – my partition is mountable!

Fsck.ext3 still tells med there are some errors to fix, but for now Life has returned! And all my pr0n as well!

Thank you Testdisk authors, thank you, thank you, thank you!
(but do implement write_part_mac, ok?)

Opened up

Mounted on top

Components:
One Parallax USB Servo controller
One Parallax standard servo A DLink DES1005D ethernet switch motherboard+casing
One dirt cheap Trust WB-3250P webcam
One dirt cheap Biltema Webcam
(The new webcam (not the one above – that one the cats killed)appears as: idVendor 0x0ac8 (Z-Star Microelectronics Group), idProduct 0×0302 (ZC0302 Webcam) and worked pretty much out-of-the-box in Linux (with gspca and stuff installed though) – a possible Windows driver might be here )

Project aims:
Motiondetection, for monitoring the backyard
To be controlled by a Python script from work!

Files:
Just some testing and learning stuff – might help someone..
PSC – Adam3′s superb controller class
Small python pygame testing thingy
Servocontroll by gamepad!

Resources:
This thread helped me get the Saitek 2900 working in Linux – thanks!
Article – How I Feed My Cats with Linux
PySerial – To do serial stuff with Python
PYgame – this might help me get remote steering working…
PYgame – some more…
Invaluable – a class to control Parallax servo with Python!
The Parallax specs and instructions for my servo controller
Robotshop.se – a great place to buy stuff!
The Sentry Gun – some inspiration/aspiration came from here, of course
Motion – motiondetection for Linux (when I get a better webcam)
Lots of links about Linux video devices
Really interesting theory/software for motion detection

simple wget loop – nice for leeching stuff..

ping a server to find out if the internetconnection is still around
(takes an ip as argument,should be placed a file I suppose)

batch rename of files – this example replaces spaces with “-”.  Can be used to replace other stuff in filenames