Yesterday, I had to replace a one-terabyte external USB hard drive attached to my home file server with a larger one…

Oh, I wasn’t going to ramble about these days’ lack of disk space, I just wanted to document what I did to get the drive up and running: maybe someone could use this article as a quick start for their own configuration. (Mine was a two-terabyte Hitachi SimpleDrive under Fedora Core Linux.)

Please note that this is not a complete newbie manual on all aspects of the procedure, so don’t expect to find detailed explanations on things like which shell command does what or why this filesystem is better than that one or why I am sudo-ing when switching to root seems to be much easier an approach.

Here we go now. (Skip steps marked with ** if you are not replacing a drive but installing a new one.)

• First of all, connect the USB drive to your running Linux machine and power the former up.

• Find out if and how the system recognized it.

$> sudo dmesg | tail
usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
usb 4-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 3
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Hitachi  HDS722020ALA330       PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] 3907029168 512-byte hardware sectors (2000399 MB)
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 34 00 00 00
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] 3907029168 512-byte hardware sectors (2000399 MB)
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 34 00 00 00
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through sdc: sdc1
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk
sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev sdc1.

From this output you can see that the drive was recognized as device /dev/sdc with a single partition /dev/sdc1.

The partition’s filesystem is not ext3. (Factory-preformatted FAT32, most likely.) Since the drive will remain attached to a Linux machine, it would make sense to reformat it into something native.

• Partition the drive.

$> sudo /sbin/fdisk /dev/sdc

Choose the appropriate options from the menu. I went this way:
p — print current partition table;
l — list known partition types (filesystems);
d — delete current partition;
n — create new partition.

For this new partition, specify:
p — primary partition;
1 — partition number;
default values for first/last cylinder;
Linux — partition type (which is etx3 on this system; ID 83 in the list of known partition types mentioned above).

And finally:
w — write table to disk and exit.

• Create filesystem (format partition).

$> sudo /sbin/mkfs.ext3 -j /dev/sdc1

• Create mount point.

$> sudo mkdir /mnt/mynewdrive

• Mount the new drive’s partition for file transfer.**

$> sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc1 /mnt/mynewdrive

• Transfer files from the old drive.**

$> sudo cp -Rvp /mnt/myolddrive/ /mnt/mynewdrive

Don’t forget the -p option to preserve file ownership and permissions. Mind the slash after myolddrive/.

This will take some time. (14 hours for approximately 800 GB in my case.)

• Unmount both drives.**

Prior to that, stop any processes/services which might still be using the drives. (In my case, for instance, it was a Samba fileserver daemon holding shared folders on the old drive.)

$> sudo umount /mnt/mynewdrive
$> sudo umount /mnt/myolddrive

Notice that the command is umount, not unmount.

• Disconnect the old drive. Reposition and/or reconnect the new one, if necessary.**

• Check if the new drive is still recognized under its original name.**

In my case, it wasn’t: it took place of the old one, which went under /dev/sdb (with partition /dev/sdb1).

For this check, look through latest system messages like you did in the beginning:

$> sudo dmesg | tail

• Adjust fstab.

Open fstab for editing:

$> sudo vi /etc/fstab

Remove old drive’s mapping**:

/dev/sdb1     /mnt/myolddrive     ext3     defaults     0 0

Add new drive’s mount options:

/dev/sdb1     /mnt/mynewdrive     ext3     defaults     0 0

Make sure to specify the correct partition name.

Save changes.

• Re-mount the new drive.

$> sudo mount /dev/sdc1

• Enjoy your new large-capacity storage.

Two terabytes ought to be enough for anybody, right?

Вопрос начинающего фотографа на одном из форумов:

“Недавно приобрел себе камеру Canon EOS 450D. За месяц успел отфоткать кучу фоток, снимал преимущественно знакомых, кошку и просто людей на улице, а теперь подумываю совместить приятное с полезным. А именно: стать свадебным фотографом. С практикой фотосъёмки знаком не понаслышке — имел опыт фотосъёмки с “Зенитом”. Вот сижу и прикидываю, что нужно для свадебной фотосъемки. У меня пока только китовый объектив, что нужен лучше, но сейчас не потяну. Реально ли только с китовым? Нужна внешняя вспышка, по деньгам прикидываю баксов за 100-150, порекомендуйте, какую лучше взять. Дополнительную карту памяти и аккумулятор куплю. Что ещё нужно? Штатив с “тросиком”? Не знаю… по-моему, не обязательно иметь.”

Ответ на том же форуме:

“Недавно приобрел себе в магазине “Медтехника” скальпель. За месяц успел изрезать кожаный диван, ковер и едва не прирезал свою кошку, а теперь подумываю совместить приятное с полезным. А именно: поработать кардиохирургом. С практикой хирургии знаком не понаслышке, имел опыт работы с консервным ножом. Вот сижу и прикидываю, что для этого нужно. Скальпель пока не заточен и только один, понимаю, что нужен другой, но сейчас не потяну. Реально ли только одним скальпелем сделать аорто-коронарное шунтирование? Нужен еще кровоостанавливающий зажим, по деньгам прикидываю баксов за 10-15, порекомендуйте, какой лучше взять. Вату и тампоны куплю сам. Что еще нужно для хирургической операции на сердце? Троакар полостной и пинцет тканевый? Не знаю… по-моему, не обязательно иметь.”

Увы, ни названия форума, ни имен авторов назвать не могу: натыкался только на перепосты. За сам факт существования оригинала тоже не ручаюсь: история больше смахивает на легенду.

Но это не столь важно. Главное — мораль той басни. (Какова?)

My most common… let’s say, case, is this:

@echo off

echo Doing something (very important)...

Put this in a BATch file, run it, and you’ll end up with a message saying

... was unexpected at this time.

No, seriously? It’s great that the engine is trying to evaluate an expression within an echo, but this time I need something much more simple: round brackets embedded into a text message. Just that. Please.

Thank heavens there is a “cure”: parentheses can be escaped with a caret character.

@echo off

echo Doing something ^(very important^)...

Now we’re good:

Doing something (very important)...

Carets can be used to escape almost any special character, even a newline — to break a single command in several lines.

An unpleasant surprise waited for me when I turned on my MacBook Pro: it said, “None of your preferred wireless networks are available.” I didn’t believe it, of course. Every other device was proving the opposite. I tried to enter the SSID and password anew… aha! It worked! Temporary memory loss, I thought. Yawn. Total shutdown and good night.

Next morning, however, I was greeted with the same phrase again: no wireless network found. Which made me choke on my coffee. A perspective of typing rather long and complex SSID and password every time the laptop is turned on or woken up did not exactly make me happy.

In the next days, I tried to fix the problem by rebooting (all over again) all involved devices, restoring the original configuration, changing the SSID and then the password, enabling/disabling the SSID broadcast, poking a finger at LEDs, swearing and, finally, “killing” the keychain file in the laptop’s system… Nada.

Yesterday, I finally performed a long-planned upgrade of Mac OS X from 10.5.something to Snow Leopard (10.6.latest). And guess what? That’s right, this turned out to be the cure.

$ tribaldance -v -n 100 -c ":-)"

I’m still trying not to breathe while opening the lid of my MacBook Pro, but it works now, every time, it does. Don’t ask me why.

This goes for both acoustic and electric guitars, except the part where you fix the strings on the bridge, which is different but not difficult. No tricks here, you’ll figure it out all right.

Just one more thing: before you fix a string on the peg, leave a slack of some three or four centimeters before you start twisting up. Otherwise, if you do it exactly as the video shows, your strings might slip.