File Utilities

Mar 5 2012

Booting from IDE drive when there are SATA drives

This is a generic sort of article… I have only tried it on one type of machine but this advice may prove useful in other situations.

As regular readers know, I volunteer at an educational non-profit organisation every Friday as a systems administrator.One of the privileges is I get to borrow a computer every so often for one of my projects. In this case I had a computer I was using as a file server (using FreeNAS v7.x). Since I had it for over three years I figured it was time to get something a little newer. A client returned a Dell GX 270 because he no longer needed it. I asked and was granted permission to replace the older machine with this one.

At first I only had two hard drives to work with. The first was the hard drive from the old computer and the second was the drive from the new one. I was able to boot from the old drive with no problem. Adding in the new drive so it would be accessed over my LAN was also easy. I had a third drive. It was a 500GB SATA drive. I had everything but the power adapter so it took a few days to connect.

The SATA drive was one I had in my Linux box before the motherboard died. It still had all the information as well as the master boot record intact. Once it was added into the 270 it wanted to take over. Like Macs there is an option which allows the user to select which drive to boot from. For a file server that’s not an acceptable solution. In this case it didn’t work very well either. The boot process was hung for 15 minutes…

After a bit of research on the net I found the solution was to boot from a rescue CD/DVD and toggle the bootable flag on the first partition on the hard drive to off. From that point things worked fine. I don’t know if the hard drive works or not since it was only yesterday I added it to the machine. Assuming there are no hardware problems I should be able to do a bunch of neat things like create virtual machines which are stored on  the LAN, set up a private iTunes server, and back up the Mini I am using at the moment…

By BlankMike • Disk Images, Disk Storage, Emulation, File Utilities, Freeware, Hardware, Public Domain, Software, Virtual Servers • 0

Jan 31 2012

Brutal Deluxe Releases Fishhead Copier for the Apple IIgs

Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe has posted a new software package for the Apple IIgs.  According to the posting:

Brutal Deluxe Software is proud to introduce Fishhead, the Caped Copier, to the Apple II community.

Fishhead is a GS/OS desktop file copier application. It offers several features which make it a powerful software for diskette and file preservation purposes:

  • Attributes preservation — All copied files keep their original date, time and other attributes (e.g. invisible or locked) information
  • Batch mode — Removable devices can be ejected and Fishhead will wait for the next medium to be inserted before copying it, and so on
  • Error handling — Fishhead does not stop on read errors, it copies as much data as possible
  • History log — The program displays and saves a log file including the result for each copied file from the source disk

Fishhead recursively copies files from a selected volume by chuncks of 256 bytes. The main idea is to recover as much data as possible from a bad medium. Fishhead has been tested (for months) on an Apple IIgs ROM 01 and ROM 3, with Appleshare (localtalk, netatalk) under System 6.0.1.

You can Download the program from the brutal deluxe website at:

http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/apple2gs/fishhead/

 

By admin • Apple IIgs, File Utilities, Software • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Jan 20 2012

Easy Rename for Mac OS X

If you are in the middle of renaming a ton of files by hand, stop.  Now there is an easier way that doesn’t involve the command line.   7 Bit Guys’ Stuff has released Easy Rename for Mac OS X, which resolves the problem of doing a mass rename based on the pattern in the file name.  While most UNIX users know how to do such a thing by command line, for those folk who want to do a quick rename on the fly, this is the program for you.

If is a free download from the Mac App Store at:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/easy-rename/id494834417?mt=12

By admin • Apple Computing, File Utilities, Macintosh, Software • 0 • Tags: , , , ,