Use hdparm to Retrieve Hard Drive Specs | hdparm is an excellent command line utility for various things concerning hard drives. A quick feature it has is to provide detailed specs of a particular hard drive. I’ll show you how it works! The command is sudo hdparm -I hard drive Here is an example: $ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdc /dev/sdc: ATA device, with
Expand Windows 7 VirtualBox Hard Drive
Expand Windows 7 VirtualBox Hard Drive | Out of space with your Windows 7 VirtualBox instance? No need to reinstall the vm. Using the free bootable iso clonezilla, you can clone your Windows 7 VirtualBox guest to a larger hard drive. I’ll show you how! 1. Download a copy of the latest stable clonezilla iso: http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php 2. Add a second larger virtual
Securely Wipe Hard Drive in Linux
Securely Wipe Hard Drive in Linux | To wipe a hard disk down to zeros, use the dd command. $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M Where /dev/sdX is the drive you want to zero out. Be extremely careful – there is no undo! For example, this zeros out the specific disk “/dev/sdf” on my system: stmiller@brahms:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdf bs=1M This
How To Dual Boot OS X and Linux
How To Dual Boot OS X and Linux | How to dual boot OS X and Linux. Works on any Intel Mac with any version of Linux! Note: rEFIt does not work with 10.7 Lion yet (step 4). Wait for an rEFIt update before attempting on a 10.7 machine. Warning: This is scary stuff – you can really trash your system and data! I
Enable FileVault in OS X
Enable FileVault in OS X | Mac OS X since 10.3 has had a feature called FileVault. FileVault as of Mac OS X 10.5 uses 256 bit AES to encrypt your home directory. This is particularly good if you use a laptop. If your laptop is stolen, the hard drive home directory contents are basically gibberish to someone if they attempt
Acronis Free for Western Digital Drives
Acronis Free for Western Digital Drives | Western Digital provides a free copy of Acronis Home 2009 for download. This only works on Western Digital drives! Here is the download page: http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119 “Acronis True Image WD Edition Software helps you to completely clone your current system drive onto your new WD hard drive. Cloning makes an exact copy of your old system
How-To Copy Time Machine to New Drive
How-To Copy Time Machine to New Drive | How can I copy my existing Time Machine backup over to a new, larger drive? The easiest way is to just use Disk Utility in OS X! Tip: Be sure to first format (Erase) your new drive as Mac OS Extended Journaled! – First, turn OFF Time Machine in your System Preferences before beginning.
Mac How-To Install Ubuntu to External USB Hard Drive
Mac How-To Install Ubuntu to External USB Hard Drive | This guide is for Intel Mac (only!) How to install Ubuntu to external USB hard disk and leave your existing Intel Apple machine and internal hard drive untouched. There seems to be a lot of confusion over this topic. Here is a method that works if you don’t want to/are unable to alter your existing
SSD Linux How-To
SSD Linux How-To | Linux has support for all things SSD. However, you do need to take a few steps to get everything working optimally! This excellent guide has instructions for how to align paritions for an SSD in Linux. I did the following for my OCZ Vertex 32GB SSD. It is serving as a single parition drive, being
Wipe partition table / MBR from a drive
Wipe partition table / MBR from a drive | How do I wipe the partition table from a hard drive? This command will wipe the partition table and master boot record. Warning! Backup any and all data first! dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 Where /dev/sdX is the location of the drive you wish to wipe. For instance, if the drive is /dev/sda, change that
