Holy Cow – BTRFS!

Recently I have been experimenting with BTRFS. BTRFS is a relatively new filesystem which has modern features, high performance, scalability, supporting file-system snapshots and on-the-fly compression. After spending the week running BTRFS on Ubuntu from within a Virtualbox VM I reinstalled my laptop using it. Ubuntu’s installer supports creating btrfs partitions, which is handy, and …

Remotely upgrading a server from 32 to 64 bit linux

This post isn’t designed to be a “how to” merely an overview of how I achieved the subject. It is possible to do this without any physical intervention but in practice I have had to visit site at least once to fix a boot error on every one I have done. Disclaimer:- When attempting this …

Recover a failing Windows hard disk using only free software and your Windows CD.

Scenario. You have a Windows machine which will not boot up but you can still access the disk, even though it makes various clunking and thunking noises. Solution. Install a new hard disk and Partedmagicos on a USB stick or CD and run either “ntfsclone” (the easiest and quickest option) or “dd_rescue”. If the NTFS …