On Tuesday morning my HDD failed on my PC at the office.  Most of my important data is in a NFS volume on a FAS6030, but my PC still had some important stuff on it.  Including a Windows XP virtual machine that has all my necessary programs (Outlook, SAP, TweetDeck) and some files that I forgot to copy over to my NFS share.  Using a tool called ddrescue I was able to save most of my data, I’ll go into how it works and what I did.

Read More…

Posted under Good Reading, Linux

Well, if some of you haven’t heard (from twitter) - I recently lost my HDD. Which not only stinks, but it is a huge pain having to rebuild to exactly how you like your system.  So I figured this would be a good time to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 (previously I ran 8.04).  After getting my O/S exactly how I like it, I installed VMware Workstation 6.5 and thankfully was able to recover my VMDK from my failed disk (more details in another blog later) and it started up just fine.   But, for some reason some of my keys were not working, first thing I noticed was Ctrl-Alt-Ins didn’t work (the alternative to Ctrl-Alt-Del for Windows logons).  Luckily, Duncan over at Yellow-Bricks already hit this hurdle and posted a blog on how to resolve.  Thanks Duncan!

Read More…

Posted under Linux, Workstation