Diary of a Network Geek

I’m not entirely sure I agree with this list, actually.

I tend to follow the dictum that, as photographers, we should strive to make a better photograph in the camera, not in the computer. However, the reality of the modern age is that Photoshop exists and, well, the people who use it will tend to have an advantage over those of us who don’t.  According to DIY Photography, there are Twelve Essential Photoshop Skills that Every Photographer Should Know.  Those twelve…
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Right, so this weekend I upgraded my laptop’s internal hard drive.

My trusty Toshiba Satellite, which I used all through my chemotherapy treatments almost two years ago, came with an 80 GB hard drive and was starting to fill up. All the pictures I take add up, I guess, especially when I shoot in RAW format. So, I decided that with drives being as cheap as they were, it was time for an upgrade. As I wrote Monday, I scooted over to MicroCenter and picked up a 500 GB Seagate 2.5inch, mobile, SATA drive on Saturday. They were on sale for $115, which is, I think, a pretty damn good price. I got a couple other things, too, since the drive upgrade and a previous memory upgrade makes my laptop the most capable machine in my house, outside of the servers upstairs. (Why are so many non-tech people surprised when I mention that I ran cable and have a server room, with servers?) Oh, and before I get too far, let me mention that you can click on any of the pictures here for larger versions if you want a closer look than the thumbnail. Just click back when you’re done admiring my work.

The other essential piece of hardware to start out with is an external USB drive adapter of some kind. I bought the Kingwin EZ-Connect, pictured here. I got that at an earlier trip to MicroCenter, with whom I do NOT have an endorsement deal, by the way. I just love their store. In any case, I got this particular one for two reasons. First, it was under $30. Second, it could handle the three major types of drives that I’m likely to encounter on a regular basis.

What you get in the box, as you can see, is a USB cable, a drive adapter, a power adapter and a power supply. Oh, you also get a small CD that has some drivers, which you don’t actually need if you’re using Windows XP, and some simple backup software. I didn’t actually use this software, but, rather, I went to Seagate’s website and downloaded their free utility called DiskWizard. There were a number of reasons why this made sense for this situation. For one thing, I didn’t want to just back up the drive, but I wanted to make a bit-for-bit mirror copy of the drive so that I can replace the old one and still have a bootable, working computer. For another, I’m familiar with Seagate’s utility and have successfully used it before.

So, after installing DiskWizard following the default prompts, I hooked up my new drive via the USB adapter.

I did install the included software and the drive was immediately recognized. Then, again, I simply followed the DiskWizard prompts with a single false step when I had to go back and change an option in the cloning configuration to make sure the new drive was set to be bootable. I cannot stress that enough! When doing this, you absolutely must make sure that the new drive is being configured to be bootable, system drive. If you don’t do that, your machine will not boot when you change out the drive. If you use DiskWizard, it will require a reboot. In fact, after setting your configuration, the software will prompt you to reboot and, after the software reboots your machine, it will automatically launch and start the cloning process. The actual drive cloning took about an hour or two. I was running around doing other things, so I didn’t get a good time on it. Best just to allow several hours and, like I did, do other things to amuse yourself while you wait.

Now, it’s important to remember to both unplug your laptop and disconnect the battery. Just unplugging won’t be enough to make your laptop safe to work on. As long as that battery is in there, you could suddenly have a jolt of electricity jump through the circuits and make any planned upgrades pretty much useless. Also? A little jolt of juice can bite you pretty hard, especially when you’re not expecting it!

The next step, obviously, is to remove the old drive.

In my case, it was pretty easy. In the past, on some laptops, getting the drive out required taking the whole machine almost totally apart. I’ll never forget having to take a laptop’s entire keyboard off the top of the case to get to drive bay! I had to take the screen off at the hinge and everything! It was a dangerous, delicate mess! But, on today’s laptops, you mostly just have to take off a single panel, as you can see in the picture. The drive was in there really snugly, thanks, in part, to the rubber, anti-vibration sleeves meant to keep the drive quieter in a laptop. What I found interesting, however, is that there were no screws holding the drive itself in. No cages or straps or anything outside of the SATA connections and the tightness of the fit. Because, the drive bay door fit very snugly and I had to apply pressure to get it in place correctly and screwed shut again.

On the right, you can see the drive bay still open with the new, freshly cloned drive in it and the old, small drive laying next to it.

This was actually a pretty simple upgrade to make. It was what I generally refer to as a “one screwdriver job”. By that I mean that I could mainly have done it with the tiny pocket tool I carry with me in my pocket. Though, in this case, I used the old, cheap red-handled screwdriver in the picture. It’s a freebie that is often used as a giveaway by tool companies. I’ve had that one since my first IT job, back when I worked for Hyatt Hotels. It’s a little beat up now, but it can still handle a nice, easy job like this.

As you can see, the formatted drive is a little smaller than advertised. Also, they tend to round up a little and bytes and megabytes and gigabytes aren’t round numbers, so the math gets a little funky. Oh, and there was a special 251Meg partition that couldn’t be clearly identified by DiskWizard, even though it cloned the partition just fine. So, when you factor in all those things, you can see the nice, big partition, which is mostly empty and waiting for me to fill it up with great pictures!
Well, that’s the plan at least.

In any case, now you have some idea how to change out a laptop hard drive if you should ever want to upgrade for yourself. I really left out a lot of the nitty-gritty detail that I felt was either self-explanatory or that you should really know how to do before attempting this in the first place. Perhaps not the best tutorial, but at least a good step-by-step overview of how to get it done!

Of course, that could describe almost any week or weekend for me.

So, Saturday, I got up early to run out and get a few parts to upgrade my laptop, braving the near cataclysmic, torrential downpour.  Naturally, I was far from the only geek hard core enough to weather the storm to spend some quality time at MicroCenter.  Though I have to admit, it wasn’t nearly as crowded as I thought it would be, even with the flooding.  I know that Fry’s Home Electronics is more popular with some geeks, but I think MicroCenter’s prices are competitive and I think I get better, less aggressive, more knowledgeable, service there.  Though, in this case, I knew just what I wanted.  My main purpose was to get a bigger internal drive for my laptop, because all the pictures that I take suck up drive space like a drunk soaking up free booze and I was starting to feel the pinch.  But, I also wanted to get a wireless, “laptop” mouse that I can throw in my bag when I hit the road, since my laptop is quickly becoming my creative workstation.  I also grabbed a bunch of magazines that I usually don’t find in my usual haunts.  Mainly Photoshop stuff, but some others that I wouldn’t normally get like Practical Web Design and Giant Robot.  The particular issue of Practical Web Design has an article about time-sensitive, dynamic stylesheets that seemed pretty cool.

In any case, after that, I ran home to start cloning my laptop drive…  In fact, I’ll have a better, detailed post on that later this week.  Once I got the cloning process started, I ran over to some friends’ house with the intention of all of us going to the Friends of the Houston Library book sale.  However, after having my car almost get caught in water far deeper than it seemed, which was made worse by a jackass in a pickup cutting me off and throwing up a wave of water almost over the hood of my car, we thought better of making the attempt.  So, instead, I did a little work on her laptop, getting it on their wireless network and running some antispyware on it.  (Though, it sounds like it already could use another cleaning, so I’ll probably be back.)

After that it was church and dinner.

Sunday, I got up early to get in a good workout.  I’ve been getting into a bad pattern of exercising late, staying up late and dragging all day long without enough sleep.  After watching another friend at dinner who’s burning her candle at both ends, I made up my mind to not let that happen this week.  So, I got my lazy bones out of bed and got breakfast and coffee and got my behind in gear for a good, longer, workout before 10:00AM.

After that I was editing some photos for a project a friend of mine in New York is putting together.  Naturally, I hooked up my new wireless mouse to get better control of my editing tools.  I got a Logitech “laptop” mouse and it works great.  It’s a little smaller than a regular mouse, but not uncomfortably so.  What’s cool about it, though, is that it has a little USB dongle that links the mouse to the computer.  When it’s not in use, it fits on the bottom of the mouse and, when you slide it on and off, it automatically turns the mouse on and off to save battery life.  That may seem like a little detail, but it’s a great feature that helps not waste batteries when you’re on the road.  That can be a big deal sometimes.  In any case, that probably took longer than it should but my graphic editing skills are weak, weak, weak.  So, the practice no doubt did me good.  Also, it was flattering to have her invite me to submit some of my photos for her project.

I also managed to get in a little reading and some photography, too.  Not much, but, still, every bit counts!  Obviously, when I get through with the book I’m reading, I’ll review it.  And, sadly, I still didn’t get any work done on the WordPress themes I want to build or the creative website either.  As busy as I get, I’m not sure how I’ll manage time to work on that as regularly as I’d like.  I am trying to leverage Google Alerts to get some of that work done, but, there’s still a component of it that requires quite a bit of work from me, so…  Well, I’ll get there somehow.  (And, yes, I count the new site as part of the “coolness to come”, along with the step-by-step post on upgrading a laptop hard drive.)

Hey, I get paid to be a geek, right?

So, I’ve been having some issues with my network and several Windows XP machines. In a nutshell, these machines seem to lose connectivity after approximately nine hours and fifteen minutes from the last restart. In other words, when my crazy-dedicated engineers work past their ninth hour, their machine slows to a crawl and eventually locks tighter than a Catholic school-girl’s knees. In any case, after weeks of troubleshooting this issue, I’ve come up empty. The best that I’ve got for these guys is either a) Don’t work such long hours or b) Reboot the machine at lunch.
In a further attempt to fully understand what is happening and at what level, I’ve gotten one of these machines and I’m going to install Windows 2000 on it. If we have the same issue, I know it’s hardware. If I don’t, I’ll be certain, within a reasonable percentage of sureity, that the issue is some arcane aspect of Windows XP. Either way, I should be closer to a real answer.

But, before I wipe my current experimental machine, I decided I wanted to back it up. Naturally, I turned to my old friend, Linux. A quick Google turned up a blog entry titled “Cloning XP with Linux and ntfsclone“. So, with a few modifications for my own environment, I followed the instructions there. Incidentally, I used the latest version of Knoppix as a boot CD.

First, open up a terminal/shell session and create a mount point with the following command:
# mkdir /tmp/server

Then, because my DHCP server didn’t give the Knoppix virtual machine the right DNS information, add your server to the /etc/hosts file.
Next, mount the network share that you want to dump the images on.
# mount -t smb -o username=administrator //server1/share /tmp/server

Check how your live CD sees the partitions you want to save with the following command:

# cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name

8       0   78150744  sda
8       1   76211608  sda1
240     0    1939136  cloop0

I want to save that 80 GB disk sda, which has a primary partition sda1. First I saved the partition table and the Master Boot Record this way:

# sfdisk -d /dev/sda >/tmp/server/images/cad1r-sfdisk-sda.dump
# dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/tmp/server/images/cad1-sda.mbr

and then the partitions:

ntfsclone -s -o - /dev/sda1   | gzip | split -b 1000m - /tmp/server/images/cad1-sda1.img.gz_

Note that this saved disk image in 1G files, in case the way I mounted the share to the network server didn’t allow for large files. Sometimes that can get tricky going from Linux to a Windows 2003 server and back, so I decided not to take any chances. It makes a mess of files, but at least it took the guess-work out for me.

Coming soon, the restore process! Keep an eye out!