Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.
Tag: OS
-
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon coming
The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I’ve installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what’s what and so far haven’t had much time to play around. I seem to recall the localization question being new in the installer, but then it’s been a while since I used the ubiquity installer (used the alternative install to setup software raid based systems.) But… other than that I haven’t poked around with it much. However, I have read that the 8.04 (April 2008) release will be codenamed Hardy Heron and will be a long term service (LTS) version. I’m MORE interested in that given that I have one server running the previous LTS release 6.06 dapper drake. I’ll be interested in upgrading it to a newer LTS EVENTUALLY, but I don’t know if I’ll jump for the upcoming April release or wait… but I did find some promising instructions for upgrading to Fiesty (7.04). It’s good to see that kind of detailed how-to as opposed to just an upgrade option on the cd so you can do it from within the OS.
-
Daylight Savings Changes on linux systems
Might should have typed this up sooner, but… a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS’s kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there’s not a lot to the fix either. Depending on the age of the install you may have an update available that addresses your daylight savings change, but if not… here’s how to do it. wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz’ – then tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz……. then…
-
Windows Vista upgrade clean install workaround
You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista’s upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions would allow you to do a “clean” install (format the drive) if you had the previous versions install media at hand. The install would stop to validate the install media and you could proceed. Very handy if recovering from a full hard drive failure, virus infestation, etc. Well the word was, Vista upgrade requires the previous OS version that you upgrade from to be installed on the Hard drive. This makes the rebuild process from such failures sound VERY nasty and tedious (read: just go buy a new pc…) However….
-
Big Ubuntu Linux news
This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?
-
Extended support for XP Home and Media center
I want to make a note of this here… Microsoft has announced that XP Home and Media center editions will get extended support on par with that of XP Pro. Essentially this means security updates for these versions of the OS should be available until 2014. Previously support for XP Home was to have ended as soon as December 2006, but was then extended modestly until after the release of Vista. The “Home” oriented products weren’t given the same length of support as the “Professional” or Business class products at that time. This announcement puts the two versions of XP on par with Pro.
-
Dell “open source” PC’s for sale
I saw yesterday that Dell has a page advertising computers with NO preinstalled OS. Dimension line… n series and they are targetted towards people that want to install an Open Source operating system like Linux. They do ship with a freedos install disc, but come without formatting/preinstalling anything on the hard drives.
They do note that they don’t support a non-dell installed operating system. (i.e. even if you put XP pro on it well make you prove that it’s a hardware problem.) Still, it’s good to see the option becoming available.
-
Microsoft Internet Explorer patches for unsupported OS versions (Windows 98 and ME)
For starters, if you’re using Windows 98 or ME still in a production system, you REALLY need to be looking at migration options and you should realize that the architecture of those systems is NOT conducive to a good secure platform. No XP isn’t perfect, but it is an improvement in many areas. That much said, if you don’t have too many choices and are wondering how you can protect the old system against the recent Windows Internet Explorer vulnerabilities…. here you go. The zero-day emergency response team has released a version of the VML vulnerability patch for older versions of Windows. So, if you REALLY need to patch an old windows 98 or ME install, you can give that a try. (No guarantees.)
-
Targetting the OS is old hat….
The Register sums up the Black Hat briefings pretty well. The Operating System level has received a lot of scrutiny in recent years for security flaws and as a result there has been a good deal of improvement there and so now, researchers are heading to the low hanging fruit of the REST of the software stack, be it the drivers, or browsers, or office software. Another area of software were those class of programs that run checking for updates for OTHER software. It’s time to realize that most ANY piece of software could compromise system security and updates need to be expected for most any part of the “software stack”.