One of the “project machines” I’ve had that’s been retired from other service was to become a “storage server” this week. The twin 250GB drives had arrived and I was ready to setup a RAID1 array (mirroring essentially…) in software and use Ubuntu 6.06 as the base operating system. I had already wiped the other drive and removed the drive, plugged in the new ones (master on the primary and secondary channels) and…. BIOS only reads 136GB. Shoot…. it was a relatively recent system (maybe 3 years…) SO…. BIOS update was my best bet I thought.
Category: Hardware
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Vmware launches beta of real to virtual converter
Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or higher) to VMware virtual machine disk format.)
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Some days you really want to slap someone at Microsoft….
So, I was formatting a drive the other day. It’s an external hard drive that will need to be readable AND writable by both Mac and Windows XP machines. So, the only choice (without paying for MacDrive to read/write to HFS+) is really FAT32. The drive is in the 250GB-300GB ballpark. So, I reference the maximum filesystem size and see that FAT32 supports up to 2TB filesystems. No problem. I was doing this from the Windows XP machine that would be one of the drives “hosts” and after much scratching around created and attempted to format the FAT32 partition – a LONG verification process ensued 30 minutes – 1 hour. After which…. “volume size too big” eh? Well… the format tool under Windows XP/2000 is crippled…
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Upgrading laptop wireless
George Ou had a good article on upgrading a laptops wireless to a multiband adapter. It looks like a fairly straightforward process. Personally, I’ve not risked much with regards to laptop repairs. (Keyboard replacement, battery replacement, hard drive replacement and memory have been the typical laptop repairs I’ve done – throw in optical or floppy drive swaps (remember when they had those?) and one or two lcd swaps and that covers 95%+ of what I’ve fixed with regards to laptop hardware.)
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Multihead PC
More than once I’ve wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it’s capable of hosting multiple graphical logins at the same time. For MOST things, a single, modern CPU is more than adequate to deal with this (memory is usually the limitation, but 1 GB ought to be enough.) So, I think all of this was prompted by a blurb about hubster which looks like it’s just a VGA-usb adapter. The company that makes it though bill it as a thin client of sorts. So, they’re essentially thinking thin-client over usb as opposed to thin-client over ethernet…
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CDROM drives with yellow exclamation point in Windows XP
I ran into something I hadn’t yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them had a yellow exclamation point in the device manager listing. Of course, two drives don’t just go bad at the same time, so I wondered if it might be the Secondary IDE connector on the system board or the cable that was causing the trouble. In retrospect, I might could have assumed that they wouldn’t show at all if that were the case, but I checked against a usb connector and good cd drive just to be sure that we could rule out hardware as the problem. So, then it came time to see if the driver was the problem.
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Tools of the trade – USB2.0 to IDE & SATA Cable
Today is the first chance I”ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter “in the field”. I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5″) or desktop (3.5″) drives as well as larger (5.5″ cdrom’s) But, it was a bit of a nuisance to have to remove the drive that I had in the case and carrying around an empty case seemed like a waste, so I ordered this from Newegg.com It’s made by Sabrant (in China..) and is designed to connect any IDE or SATA drive to the usb port.
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Recovering lost files
There’s an article at linux.com that gives a good overview of using testdisk and PhotoRec. Testdisk should be able to recover at the partition level and PhotoRec should be able to just pull the files out of a damaged partition. Truth is Hard drives fail in a number of different ways and some of those can give the same error messages. Not too long ago my brother had a laptop hard drive failure, it gave a “no partition found” kind of error message. We talked about a utility such as ghost4linux (g4l) which includes dd_rescue which does a remarkable job with failing disks.
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Skype and USB phones….
I’ve seen skype I just haven’t used it personally until very recently. In fact there was a place (dialpad?) that I had used once upon a time for a few free long distance calls online. It was neat, but had some limitations (delay). It quickly became non-free and frankly the microphone I have hooked up to the PC fell back in the corner beside the desk and I haven’t dug it out in quite a while. A few weeks ago though my Dad discovered Skype and ordered a cheap ($17) “phone” that plugs into the usb port of the pc and can be used with skype and a variety of other services. (in fact, it works as a generic usb sound card so… there might be other possibilities for using it to record wav files directly, etc.)
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Strange net problems with a Netgear FS608 switch
This was weird and now that the switch is replaced I haven’t been able to duplicate it, but let me explain. There was a netgear fs608 (8 port unmanaged) switch plugged into a linksys router (model number not noted.) The cable was straight (although the fs608 has support for link through straight or crossover cables.) This setup worked well for quite some time. 4 computers and a printer hooked up. 3 pcs with fixed address and 1 with DHCP for their IP address. Well, I had a call that two pcs were unable to connect to the network and when I got there and looked… sure enough 169.**** ip addresses from Microsoft’s “auto configure” pool.