No More Burning CDs

Do you have a stack of CD's that you use for OS installations and Boot Discs for diagnostics? You can get rid of them! With Pendrive Linux, you can turn your USB Flash Drive into a bootable CD carousel. Run the BootMyISO software, Create or download ISOs of your CDs, copy them to your drive, edit the menu.lst file and now you can boot up to your CDs wherever you go.

This is a great tool if your working on a machine without an optical drive. And you can access all of your favorite diag CDs with one flash drive.

The 2.19TB Limit - Digital Hoarders Will Need To Upgrade

It always seems that as hard drive technology matures and capacities grow, we learn that the supporting hardware and software aren't caught up.  Do you remember getting your first hard drive that was larger than 137GB?

History...

Older machines could not recognize hard drives with volumes exceeding 137GB.  This was due to the BIOS using a 28-bit boundary.  In order to see larger capacities, the BIOS needing to support 48-bit addressing.  This would require a BIOS upgrade (if applicable and available) to exceed the limitation.

Once your hardware used 48-bit addressing, your next hurdle was the operating system.  Your version of Windows (2000 or XP) would require an upgrade to a service pack (minimal SP3 and SP1 respectively). 

Linux also needed a kernel upgrade to use the larger drives.  Even Apple had requirements: Mac OS 10.2 or later and the system BootROM must support the drive.

Present day...

Now that everyone has replaced their legacy hardware and has upgraded to newer operating systems, it's time to retire that 500GB hard drive and go out and get a 2.5TB or 3TB drive.  The only problem is, you guessed it, your hardware is once again legacy.

At the present time, most computers don't support anything beyond 2.19TB.  It's the same problem all over again.  You will require a specific operating system and specific hardware.  Windows XP is out of the picture.  It uses legacy MBR (Master Boot Record) partitioning to access hard disks, which limits the readable capacity to 2^32 * 512-bytes, or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes.  Sorry XP, you tiger now!

You will need an operating system that support GPT (GUID Partition Table), such as Windows Vista, Windows 7, or MAC OS 10.5.  According to Western Digital, Linux solutions are available, but you need to contact your operating system provider for support.  I'm having some trouble finding documentation regarding Linux support for the larger capacties.

Once you have GPT support, you can then use your larger than 2.19TB drive... as secondary storage only.  If you want to boot from a behemoth drive, your motherboard must have UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) instead of BIOS and your OS must be 64-bit.  Even Windows 7 32-bit cannot boot from one of these large drives.

Western Digital seems to be pioneering the launch of these extraordinarily sized hard drives.  With their 2.5TB and 3.0TB drives, they're including an add-on card to help get around some of the obstacles for using their drives.  On their site, they have a nice little chart summarizing what was said above in regards to operating system support.  Here's a nice little review on the 3TB models from Anandtech.com

Additionally, Asus has released a software solution to get those of us not wanting to upgrade yet access to the >2.19TB spectrum.  As said on TomsHardware.com, "The drawback is that the software only works with Asus motherboards and doesn't create a bootable partition..."

To sum it up, if you have the need for more storage, you're probably going to need some upgrades.

Change Your Default Windows Copy Handler

Have you ever tried copying files but the process was halted because Windows had trouble with one of the files? And then you're left not knowing exactly which files copied? Moving your files from one location to another is made easier with TeraCopy.

TeraCopy lists your files as they are copying and gives a status of the file. If a file is skipped because it already exists or another reason, TeraCopy will continue to work until all files have been processed.

Make your file copying tasks faster and easier. TeraCopy is definitely worth the download.

Command Line Completion

A feature that most people probably don't know about is command line completion in DOS. If you still use cmd.exe in Windows, you can save a little time by hitting TAB to complete filenames and paths/folders.

This makes navigating and launching commands quicker. Give it a try. Open a command prompt, and simply hit TAB. It will scroll through the files/folders within the directory. You can also auto complete paths as you're typing them, not just files/folders in your current directory.

Command line completion also works with most command line interfaces: Unix/Linux shells, OS X Terminal, Cisco IOS, and more. Check out the Wikipedia page dedicated to command line completion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_line_completion

Welcome to Adam's Edge

This is my contribution to Digital Copy Room, where tech and tomfoolery come together.

Here are a few things for the kick off party...

Have you heard of FireSheep?  It's a FireFox extension that can be used to "hijack" someones wireless connection in order to obtain their login information for various web sites.  According to this article, Facebook and Twitter are 2 of the worst web sites that were tested.  Please be sure to secure your home wifi connection and be cautious when browsing while on public wifi.

To break up the seriousness:

Here is a public display of drunkenness.  He doesn't want to lose his buzz so he goes out for more beer.  Too bad for him the store is some kind of fun house.

Worst Shopping Run Ever - Watch more Funny Videos