Posts Tagged: HDD


24
Jan 10

Ubuntu / Windows Sharing a Dropbox folder on NTFS

Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions:
/dev/sda1:Windows File System
/dev/sda2:Linux File System
/dev/sda3:Data Partition

I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all.

Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point.

/dev/sda3 /media/Shared ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_GB.UTF-8 0 0

Then change your Dropbox location to wherever you have the folder under /media/Shared/ (or as I do and just symbolically link it to under your Home folder, This is also a good idea because Windows defaults to calling the Dropbox folder “My Dropbox” whereas in *nix its simply “Dropbox”)

Last but not least

sudo umount /dev/sda3

sudo mount /media/Shared

dropbox start

Then just enjoy the 2.5Gb of hard disk you just saved.


13
Jul 09

Delayed Post: How I Installed Windows 7 From USB HDD

As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives.

This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on.

  1. Get a USB drive > 4GB
  2. Use The Disk Managment pane in Computer Managment (Control Panel > Administrative tools)
  3. Find your drive and right-click > Format the partition as NTFS
  4. Once its formatted, right click it again and ‘Mark Partition as Active’
  5. Use a image mounter such as WinCDEmu to mount the Windows 7 image
  6. Drop into a cmd prompt and navigate to the drive where the Window7 image is mounted, cd to ‘boot’ and execute ‘bootsect /nt60 X:’ where X: is the drive letter the target partition is mounted on.
  7. Copy the contents of the mounted Windows 7 image to ‘X:’
  8. Reboot and if you dont know how to boot from a USB drive, you probably arn’t reading this, but if not…

I know  there are alternative methods for doing this in Linux, but since i didnt use them in this instance, i cant comment on them.

FYI: Windows 7 is now my full time OS, and frankly im suprised; Theres a few things I miss, like a nice easy command line networking, SSH built in, a decent X11 server, but for a  all round notes/documentation/lil-bit-o-code machine, the Tableting pros few  out-weigh the cons. E.G The wonderous marvelous stupendous Math Input Panel that outputs in MathML!


13
Jul 09

Delayed Post: LENOVO ROCKS

I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible.

From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating.

About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100″ I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily.

That was on a Friday at around 4:30. By 10am Tuesday, a fresh and shiny harddrive was on my desk.

Something that I should point out is that I got this machine from Lenovo America, with no extra fancy warrenties or anything, and they STILL gave me a great quality of service. I dont want to come across as ‘glowing’ or anything, but my next machine after this is going to be a Lenovo.

My only qualm about the experience was that there is no realistic way to ‘restore to factory settings’ for a blank drive on a machine with on Disk Drive  but I wanted to try out Windows 7 RC anyway and installed it from USB. But thats for a different post.


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