Another One Bytes The Dust

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My 2Tb Western Digital Caviar Green is dying – 1305 unfixable sectors! Off to RMA land for that, when it comes back its being relogated to “backup in the cupboard” drive.

I’ve spent the last 12 hours or so trying to back up the 1.2Tb of data to other drives – luckily I still have an unused 1Tb WDC Caviar Black in the cupboard (the last RMA!) and some free space on my 1.5Tb WDC Green.

I’m replacing it with two Hitachi XL2000 external drives which I’m going to remove from their USB2 enclosure and mount the drives internally – as under the hood they are apparently Deskstar 7K2000 drives, which are 7200rpm SATA disks with 32Mb cache, and they’re not stupid 4k AFD drives like WDC’s offerings. It will invalidate the 2-year warranty, but HDD warranties are pretty pointless as you only get the same old shitty drives back again, its not like a refund.

I ended up getting one from Tesco for £57 using the £10 off £50 code TDX-KLH4, and then another one using the £10 off £75 code TDX-MNGK and buying a pack of 100 CD-R’s to make up the difference. So 4Tb of storage and some CD’s for £127 for in-store pickup is not too shabby.

I’ve also ordered a 96Gb Kingston V+100 SSD drive for the fileserver to replace its ancient 250Gb WDC Caviar Blue, for £80, plus a new PSU with a 135mm fan, and a SATA dock. Blimey the accountant will be pleased at all the expenses and VAT receipts!

What A Recovery

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I’ve been playing with compiling Cyanogenmod7′s fork of Koush’s ClockWorkMod Recovery 3.0.2.7

The github source is here and of course Gerrit for the latest code under review.

First you compile CM7 for your target platform as usual. This is needed to create some supporting libraries and the actual recovery.img file, including the kernel for your phone of course:

. build/envsetup.sh && brunch blade

Then you create the signed flashable zip:

TARGET_PRODUCT=cyanogen_blade make recoveryzip

That results in out/target/product/blade/utilities/update.zip

You can also set the product to zte_blade but because it will differ from the CM7 build target, it will recompile a lot of stuff, but it still works just fine (in fact that’s what I have installed).

ROMManager still reports the version as 3.0.2.7, but when you boot into recovery it shows as “CWM-based recovery 4.0.1.4″. It seems to be faster doing backups than Koush’s version as it doesn’t output verbose messages and progressbars.

Update: just noticed the zip isn’t actually suitable for a first-time recovery install, its only an update to replace a stock recovery or an earlier clockworkmod. the recovery.img file is is fine though – it includes the kernel and formats the /recovery partition.

Backup Night

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I spent most of last night (bit sad innit?!) backing up my computers – well it started off as I thought I should clone my Mac Mini (in case I decide to buy OSX Lion) which I’ve never done before.

Booted Ubuntu 11.04 from a LiveCD, and dd’ed an 80Gb disk image to the 1Tb NTFS drive over USB. Ubuntu 11.04/Unity is a bit better than Fedora 15/Gnome Shell.

Click for fullsize

Click for fullsize

Did the same with the laptop, 160Gb image that time, but its XP+Fedora, did the 80Gb desktop the other day and the other 64Gb desktop a while back. I’ve got to clone my HTPC too, that’s running Win7+Fedora, think that’s 250Gb.

Then I backed up the images to my fileserver. I decided that over 300Gb of disk images (so far – all the PC’s would come to about 900Gb) was a bit much to keep on my desktop machine or eSATA backup drive, so I’ve just got images on the USB drive and the fileserver, I can’t see both failing. I’ve got a spare 1Tb drive lying around which I might get one of those weird docks for and free up a few hundred gigs on the fileserver!

Thinking about it, I should clone the fileserver’s boot drive too, although that would be a 250Gb image – I could just backup used blocks with Clonezilla or Acronis but I don’t trust either anymore. Maybe I’ll treat the fileserver to a little 64Gb SSD or something, its running Ubuntu 9.10 so could probably do with an upgrade when 11.10 gets released in October.

Halfway through all of this we had a power surge which rebooted my computers, so had to re-rsync the data drives on two of them and the eSATA drive, and check the image on the USB had copied properly to the fileserver (md5sum runs slow over USB2!) left that going this morning, its done now.

Blog Makeover

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I’ve given the blog a bit of a makeover as I’m fed up of trying to fudge Google +1 and Facebook Like buttons onto the old CognoBlue theme and G+ was posting the tag cloud content instead of the post itself!

I’ve made a fork of the TwentyEleven theme with some modifications to header.php, footer.php and style.css to make the content wider and get rid of some wasted space. There’s some problems with WP-Syntax too – like the line number background colour is overridden by the main stylesheet, so I’ve put a custom wp-syntax.css in my theme too.

I even made a custom header.jpg with my GIMP skillz! It will be easier to maintain this way rather than trying to merge in all the changes every time I update WordPress. I’ve called my theme Twenty Twelve ;)

I’m using a regular plugin to do the G+1/FB stuff and I’ve removed a couple of plugins and widgets too.