Systems

Sometimes I have to check drives under their native operating system. Recently I wanted to access a ntfs partition directly under Windows running inside a virtual machine. Here’s how to (easily) do it: #>VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ./ntfs_test.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdb -register VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.4 (C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH All rights...
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I have a home server I use for all kinds of stuff when I’m away. I have set it up recently so that it can serve a folder mounted over the network from a Windows machine. And this is where the fun started! The folders and files appear correctly, I can navigate and I...
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God a fancy new drive? SSD maybe? TRIM support advertised? Well, here’s how you can check if TRIM support is actually enabled and working in your windows installation: Start a command prompt window (WIN+R, type cmd and press enter) In the command prompt window type the following: fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify You will get...
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A backup NAS I set up for a client had some problems – i.e. from time to time the network card would hang forcing a reboot (the machine was headless). The disks in the nas are RAID 1 providing redundancy in case of failure. We wanted the same with the network. So, nothing easier...
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Let’s say you run a headless server and you want to fsck the main partition. The easy solution in this case is (if possible) to force fsck to run on the next boot. If you run slackware than all you really need is to create an empty file in /etc called forcefsck You could...
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One of my clients called be mecause every now and then his was bugged by Windows XP to change his password. This seemed weird as XP doesn’t do this by default. Probably it was set to expire by someone or by some friendly security suite. Fortunately the solution for this expiring password problem is...
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I have some albums that were ripped in wma form (yes a shame I know). I wanted them converted into mp3 so my collection remains consistent. So this would be a command to run in a folder filled with .wma files. This keeps the names but not the tags so be sure to use...
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If you, like many of my clients regularly receive files from partners that have already upgraded to microsoft office 2007 have the annoyance that the files are always saved in the docx format (because people don’t go to the trouble to Save as office 2003) then you probably think that it’s time to upgrade....
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I found this weird looking process working on an infected computer. Further investigation revealed that it just came with a Marvell network driver. It just sits there and creates a log file, so leaving it in should not hurt anything. They should name their programs more peaceful
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We got for my wife a much needed upgrade for her aging Toshiba laptop. The new one came with Windows 7  64 bit. I managed to get all her old software working with the exception of Oxford Superlex. This one is a dictionary from the Windows 3.11 ages. It worked fine in all windowses...
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