Thursday, January 06, 2011

So I finally got myself an IPhone 4

And its absolutely gorgeous.
One thing you really need to be be wary of though, if you use the Maps or any other app with GPS, make sure its turned off. You do this by double clicking the home button. The running apps pop up, you tap and hold one of them till the little minus sign appear. Then tap on the minus.

If you don't do this expect your battery to drain much faster than it would with normal phone usage.

Hard Drive Disasters

A few days ago I started getting S.M.A.R.T warnings on bootup, and my hard drive suddenly seemed to be running a lot slower. So I called up my hardware guy and ordered another hard-drive. Got a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda. Maybe not the best choice as the drive that was failing was a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda that was just about a year old. But what the hell, in the past Seagate has served me well so lets give them another chance.

The last time I had a hard drive conk out on me I had to have the hardware guy take it and recover the data. Ended up with a lot of corrupted files and had to reinstall everything from scratch.

This time, thanks to S.M.A.R.T I had a bit of warning before the crash and the data on the drive was still accessible so I decided to clone the drive. Found a bunch of free tools but a lot of them duplicated the partitions, so I would end up with the same partition sizes as before, and when you're doubling the size of your hard drive there's not much sense in that.

Then I came across a free tool called XXClone.


This promised to clone my hard drive without having to have the same size partition, so I decided to give it a shot. Popped the new drive into an external case, and started the cloning process. Worked really well. Ended up not having to reinstall anything, which was a real relief.

The only problem was that while my system partition was only taking up about 20 GB of space, the cloning process still took a really long time, I ended up going to sleep and let it run unattended, so I'm not sure exactly how long it took, but definitely more than 3 hours. This was probably not the Software's fault though as my original hard drive was running slowly.