Analyzing SMART hard drive reports

Monday, January 19th, 2009

SMART testing has been around for a while and isn’t very well understood. I can’t say that I’m an expert on it, but I’ve come to have several fairly well developed ideas in regards to it. First off, if I have a live hard drive that fails to complete a SMART test, it’s time for […]

Checking the SMART details of a hard drive with an Ubuntu Boot CD

Monday, January 12th, 2009

S.M.A.R.T. is a self monitoring and reporting tool built into every modern hard drive. Did you know that you can use an ubuntu linux boot cd to check that smart status and run SMART tests on your drive? This is the same boot cd that you can use to test out or install the ubuntu […]

Hard drive testing utilities

Friday, December 7th, 2007

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 […]

Booting from CD when a systems BIOS won’t let you

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Along the way on my permissions nightmare last night, I made matters worse by changing permissions on a fairly important file. In order to fix that I was going to need to reboot from a boot disk. The only problem was boot floppys typically don’t come with reiserfs support (only the boot cds I’ve found […]

Banks and Web security

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

George Ou has a good post on Banks cheating their way to meet web security guidelines. Many of the observations that he notes come from the Between the Lines column here and are SPOT ON. The biggest I see is related to “multifactor authentication”….    Send article as PDF   

Epson Perfection 1650 scanner and Windows XP Limited User account

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

“We tried scanning and all that happened was the lamp moved back and forth…. Nothing else happened.” That was the description I had and the request to see why the scanner was broken. It hadn’t been long since the Epson scanner had been hooked up to a new XP Pro system. The machine sees quite […]

Google
 
Web www.averyjparker.com